Italian Shoes (20 page)

She spoke quickly, as if time was short. I told her about Harriet and Louise, and how I now felt duty-bound to track her down, and find out if she was still alive.

‘Did you hope I wouldn't be? That I'd died?'

‘There was a time when I did. But not any more.'

The telephone rang. She answered, listened to what was said, than replied briefly but firmly. There were no empty places in her home for errant girls. She already had three teenagers to look after.

I entered a world I knew nothing about. Agnes Klarström ran a foster home where she lived with three teenage girls who, in my day, would have been classified as tearaways. The girl Sima came from one of Gothenburg's sink estates. It wasn't possible to say for certain how old she was. She had come to Sweden as a lone refugee, hidden in a long-distance lorry via the southern port of Trelleborg. During her journey from Iran, she had been advised to dump all her identification papers the moment she set foot on
Swedish soil, change her name and lose all traces of her original identity to avoid deportation should she be caught. All she had was a slip of paper with the three Swedish words it was assumed she needed to know.

Refugee, persecuted, alone.

When the lorry eventually stopped outside Sturup airport, the driver pointed to the terminal building and said she should go there and look for a police station. She was eleven or twelve at the time; now she was about seventeen, and the life she had led in Sweden meant that she only felt safe with the samurai sword in her hands.

One of the other girls in the household had run away two days ago. There was no fence round the property, no locked doors. Nevertheless, anybody who left was regarded as a runaway. If it happened too often, Agnes would eventually lose patience. When found, the girl in question would be faced with a new home where the gates would be substantial and the keyrings large.

The runaway, an African from Chad, called Miranda, had probably gone to stay with one of her friends who, for some reason, was called Teabag. Miranda was sixteen and had come to Sweden with her family as a refugee, as part of a UN quota.

Her father was a simple man, a carpenter by trade and very religious, who had soon buckled in the face of the endless cold weather and the feeling that nothing had turned out as he had hoped. He had locked himself into the smallest of the three rooms in which the large family lived, a room with no furniture, only a small pile of African sand that had been in their battered suitcases
when they arrived in their new homeland. His wife used to place a tray with food and drink outside the door three times a day. During the night, when everybody else was asleep, he would go to the bathroom, and perhaps also go out for lonely walks around town. At least, they assumed he did, because they would sometimes find wet footprints on the floor when they woke up the next morning.

Miranda eventually found this too much to bear, and one evening she had simply left, perhaps hoping to go back to where she came from. The new homeland had turned out to be a dead end. Before long she was being picked up by the police for petty theft and shoplifting and ended up being shunted around from one penal institution to another.

And now she had run away. Agnes Klarström was furious, but was determined not to rest until the police had made a determined effort to find her and bring her back.

There was a photograph of Miranda pinned up on the wall. The girl's hair was plaited and arranged artistically, clinging to her skull.

‘If you look carefully, you notice that she has plaited in the word “fuck” next to her left temple,' said Agnes.

I could see that she was right.

There was also a third girl in the foster home that was Agnes Klarström's mission and source of income. She was the youngest of the three, only fourteen, and a skinny creature reminiscent of a timid caged animal. Agnes knew next to nothing about her. She was a bit like the child in
the old folk tale who suddenly finds herself standing in a town square, having forgotten her name and where she came from.

Late one evening two years previously, an official at the railway station in Skövde had been about to close down for the night when he found her sitting on a bench. He told her to leave, but she didn't seem to understand. All she could do was hold up a piece of paper on which it said ‘Train to Karlsborg', and he began to wonder which of the pair of them was going mad, as there hadn't been a train from Skövde to Karlsborg for the last fifteen years.

A few days later she started appearing on newspaper placards as ‘The Railway Child in Skövde'. Nobody seemed to recognise her, although there were pictures of her wherever you looked. She didn't have a name, psychologists examined her, interpreters who spoke every language under the sun tried to get her to say something, but nobody had any idea where she came from. The only clue to her past was the mysterious slip of paper with the words ‘Train to Karlsborg'. They turned the little town of Karlsborg on the shores of Lake Vättern inside out, but nobody recognised her and nobody could understand why she had been waiting for a train that stopped running fifteen years ago. An evening newspaper had conducted a poll of its readers and given her the name Aida. She was given Swedish citizenship and a personal identity number after doctors agreed that she must be about twelve years old, thirteen at most. Because of her thick, black hair and olive-coloured skin, it was assumed that she came from somewhere in the Middle East.

Aida didn't speak a word for two years. Only when every other possibility had been exhausted and Agnes Klarström took her in was any progress made. One morning Aida came to the breakfast table and sat down. Agnes had been talking to her ever since she'd arrived, trying to stir up some reaction in Aida, and now she asked in a friendly tone what she would like.

‘Porridge,' she said in almost perfect Swedish.

After that, she started talking. The psychologists who came flocking round assumed that she had picked up the language by listening to everything said by all those trying to make her speak. A significant fact supporting this theory was that Aida knew and understood a large number of psychological and medical terms that would otherwise hardly be normal vocabulary for a girl of her age.

She talked, but she had nothing at all to say about who she was, or what she was supposed to do in Karlsborg. Whenever anybody asked her what her name was, she replied as one might have expected:

‘I'm called Aida.'

She appeared on all the newspaper placards again. There were voices muttering in dark corners, suggesting that she had fooled everybody and that her silence had been a smokescreen to overcome all resistance and guarantee her full citizenship in Sweden. But Agnes thought there was a different explanation. The very first time they had met, Aida had stared at her amputated arm. It was as if the sight of it rang a bell with her, as if she had been swimming in deep water for years, but had now finally
reached the shallows where she could stand up. Perhaps Agnes's stump signified something Aida recognised and made her feel secure. Perhaps she had seen people having limbs chopped off. Those doing the chopping were her enemies, and those on the receiving end were the only people she could trust.

Aida's silence was due to her having seen things that no human being, least of all a young child, should ever be exposed to, and consequently she never said anything about her past life. It was as if she was slowly liberating herself from the remains of horrific experiences, and might now be in a position slowly to start on a journey towards a life worth living.

And so Agnes Klarström now ran her little foster home caring for these three girls, with financial support from various local councils. Lots of people were begging her to open her doors to more girls skulking around in the outer reaches of society. But she refused: in order to provide the help and feeling of security necessary to make a real impact, she needed to keep her activities on a small scale. The girls in her care often ran away, but they nearly always came back again. They stayed with her for a long time, and when they finally left her for good, they always had a new life in store for them. She never took in more than three girls at a time.

‘I could have a thousand girls if I wanted,' she said. ‘A thousand abandoned, wild girls who hate being alone and the feeling of not being welcome wherever they go.
My girls realise that without money all you receive is contempt. So they disfigure themselves, they stab people they've never met before – but deep down they are screaming in pain from a wound they don't understand.'

‘How come you got involved in all this?'

She pointed at the arm I had amputated.

‘I used to be a swimmer, as you might recall. There must have been something about that in my records. I wasn't just a hopeful, I really could have become a champion. Won medals. I can say, without bitterness, that my strong point was not my legs, but the strength I had in my arms.'

A young man with a ponytail marched into the room.

‘I've told you before that you must knock first,' she shouted. ‘Out you go! Try again!'

The young man gave a start, went out, knocked and came in.

‘Half right. You must wait until I tell you to come in. What do you want?'

‘Aida's upset. She's threatening everybody. Mainly me. She says she's going to strangle Sima.'

‘What's happened?'

‘I don't know. Maybe she's just miserable.'

‘She'll have to learn to cope with that. Leave her alone.'

‘She wants to speak to you.'

‘Tell her I'm coming.'

‘She wants you to come now.'

‘I'll be there in a minute.'

The young man left the room.

‘He's not up to it,' she said with a smile. ‘I think he needs somebody snapping at his heels all the time. But he doesn't mind my criticising him. After all, I can always blame everything on my arm. He's come to me thanks to some unemployment benefit scheme or other. His dream is to be in one of those television reality programmes where the participants get to screw each other in front of the cameras. If he can't manage that, then he hopes to become a presenter. But simply helping my girls seems to be beyond him. I don't think Mats Karlsson is going to make much of a career for himself in the media.'

‘You sound cynical.'

‘Not at all. I love my girls, I even love Mats Karlsson. But I'm not doing him a favour by encouraging his flawed dreams, or letting him think that he's making a positive contribution here. I'm giving him an opportunity to see himself for what he is, and perhaps carve out a meaningful life. Maybe I'm wrong in underestimating him. One day he might have his long hair cut off, and try to make something of his life.'

She stood up, escorted me out into a lounge and said she would be back shortly. The rock music coming from somewhere upstairs was still excessively loud.

Melted snow was dripping from the roof outside the windows, songbirds were flitting around like hastily formed shadows.

I gave a start. Sima had entered the room behind my back, without a sound. This time she wasn't holding a sword. She sat down on a sofa and tucked her legs underneath herself. But she was on guard the whole time.

‘
Why were you watching me through your binoculars?'

‘You weren't the one I was looking at.'

‘But I saw you. Paedophile!'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I know your type! I know what you're like.'

‘I came here to meet Agnes.'

‘Why?'

‘That's something between us.'

‘You fancy her, do you?'

I was shocked, and blushed.

‘I think it's time to conclude this conversation.'

‘What conversation? Answer my question!'

‘There's nothing to answer.'

Sima looked away, and seemed to have tired of trying to talk to me. I felt offended. The accusation that I was a paedophile was beyond anything I could ever have imagined. I looked furtively at her. She was intent on chewing her fingernails. Her hair seemed to be a mixture of red and black, and was tousled, as if she had combed it while in a temper. Behind that hard exterior, I thought I could discern a very small girl in clothes much too big and black for her.

Agnes came into the room. Sima immediately withdrew. The lion-tamer had arrived, and the beast had slunk away, I thought. She sat down on the same chair that Sima had occupied, and tucked her legs underneath her, as if she were imitating her foster-daughter.

‘Aida is a little girl, and words have suddenly started pouring out of her,' she said.

‘What's happened?'

‘Nothing at all. She's just been reminded of who she is. A big, hopeless nothing, as she puts it. A loser among lots of other losers. If somebody started a Loser Party in Sweden, there'd be no shortage of members to contribute lots of experience. I'm nearly thirty-three years old. What about you?'

‘Twice that.'

‘Sixty-six. That's old. Thirty-three isn't much at all. But it's enough to realise that there has never been so much tension in this land of ours as there is today. But nobody seems to have noticed. At least, none of the people you might think ought to have their fingers on the pulse. There's an invisible network of walls in Sweden, and it's getting worse by the day – dividing people up, increasing the distance between them. Superficially, the opposite might seem to be the case. Get on a tube train in Stockholm and go to the suburbs. It's not very far in terms of miles, but nevertheless, the distance is enormous. It's rubbish to talk about entering another world. It's the same world. But every station on the way out from the city centre is another wall. When you eventually get to the outskirts, it's up to you if you choose to see the truth of the matter or not.'

‘And what is the truth?'

‘That what you think is the periphery is in fact the centre, and it's slowly recreating Sweden. The country is slowly rotating, and outer and inner, near and far, centre and outskirts are changing. My girls exist in a no-man's-land in which they can see neither backwards nor forwards. Nobody wants them, they are superfluous,
rejected. It's no wonder that every morning when they wake up, the only thing they can be sure about is their own worthlessness, staring them in the face. So they don't want to wake up! They don't want to get out of bed! They've had bitterness drilled into them since they were five, six years old.'