The Merman (7 page)

Children weren't actually allowed up in the wing, but they made an exception for us. Dad showed us his cell, which had real bars behind the window pane, and there was a bed and a table which were fastened to the floor. Robert was absolutely thrilled, as if he were in the midst of the plot of an exciting movie.

I don't know how the kids at school got wind that Dad was inside. Maybe it was the teacher who told them, or maybe the rumour just spread spontaneously. At any rate, everything changed. The others in the class started to call me names, they hid my clothes, put dog shit in my wellies and were generally nasty. And yet my brother's fate was many times worse. The kids in his class didn't even care about shunning him; they went after him physically right from the start. I dedicated the majority of my upper primary years to attempting to protect him, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't always be there. His problems just kept growing, with difficulties paying attention and truanting: he might vanish from school at any time, just disappear during recess and head down to the sea and stay there until evening. And then he started pissing his pants...

He got educational support and special teachers who helped him, but all this made him stick out that much more in the eyes of the others. Finally, people could do anything at all to him with no shame. Spit on him, kick his bike apart, pelt him with snowballs so hard that his glasses broke. And the words they spat at him, even though they were just young children: pig, puke, spazz, pissypants. Things like that.

The autumn when Robert started in Year Seven was initially a relief for me. I hadn't been able to be there for him the previous two years. As for me, I'd sort of fallen by the wayside as far as the others were concerned since Tommy joined our class. Apart from certain insults, like Ironing Board, nobody was particularly nasty to me any more. Gerard and his gang didn't give a damn about us.
At the very most, Tommy and I were a sort of vacuum in their world. And now my brother and I would suddenly be in the same building and sharing the playground. I would be able to keep a closer eye on the situation. And Tommy had also promised to help out, so if we both kept our eyes peeled we'd increase the chances of rescuing him.

That's what I had hoped. But instead everything just got worse. Murphy's Law, as the lads at school would say.

Early on Saturday morning I finally got hold of Tommy. It was one of his brothers who answered. I was just about to say that I'd seen him at the fisherman's huts the day before, but stopped myself at the last second. It took a while before Tommy came to the phone. The radio was on in the background. Somebody was clattering around with the crockery in the kitchen.

‘I heard what happened at school,' was the first thing he said when he picked up. ‘You should report them.'

‘How do you know that? You weren't even there.'

‘One of the lads from next door came here and told me. He said Gerard and his gang fed you grass.'

I told him about the kitten and all the rest, but I spared him certain details of what had happened in the woods.

‘So now they think you blabbed?'

‘It seems that way.'

I could hear him inhaling and exhaling, out of breath, as if he had run over to the phone.

‘Or else he just made that up in order to give somebody a hard time. It happened to be you this time, it could just as well have been me or anybody else.'

‘They wouldn't try it on with you. You've got your brothers.'

It struck me that Tommy didn't sound the slightest bit ill. Maybe he'd just been playing truant the past week.

‘And they're saying they're going to take it all out on Robert.'

‘What's he got to do with it?'

‘Nothing, as far as I know.'

He was silent for a moment. Someone turned up the radio in the background.

‘So what are you going to do now?'

‘Pay Gerard a grand so he'll leave us alone. And to cap it all, my dad's on his way home with a mate of his to ruin the rest of our autumn.'

‘Bloody hell... But how does Gerard know somebody blabbed?'

‘Peder said he had to go up to the headmaster's office, and L.G. knew about what had happened. And since he hadn't reported it himself, it must have been somebody else.'

‘Who else is there to choose from?'

‘The lads in the gang, maybe one of the younger ones.'

‘But wouldn't Gerard have checked that out? They practically shit themselves whenever he so much as looks at them. They would spontaneously confess without him needing to ask them.'

‘It could be Peder or Ola,' I said. ‘Didn't Peder have a cat at home when we were in Year Seven? She might have had kittens. It might have been one of them. A kitten his little sister got or something. And then Gerard just took it for himself, even though Peder didn't want him to.'

‘I don't get it.'

‘Well, somebody blabbed, and it wasn't me. Somebody who thinks he's gone too far.'

I heard a rustling on the line and the outlines of a voice whispering in the background.

‘Are you still there?' I asked.

‘Yeah... I'm here. How are you going to get hold of a thousand kronor?'

‘It'll work out somehow. I was thinking of going into town later today... I've got some plans.'

‘It might be best if you stayed off school for a while. Until things calm down.'

‘Gerard would just view that as proof that it was me who blabbed.
I'm going to go in as if nothing happened. The hard part will be persuading my brother. Normally it's the Year Sevens who go after him. Now it's the Year Nines.'

‘You've got to speak to someone... a grown-up, I mean.'

‘Who with? My mum? You must be joking.'

Neither of us said anything. I considered the option of asking Tommy's brothers to do something. They had been known as fighters when they were younger. For a brief period they had even hung around a bit in Dad's circle, in the days when he worked at the mink farm. But since they had taken on the boat a few years ago, they had calmed down. They might be able to scare Gerard, but only for a short while. He was too messed up to go round being frightened for very long. And besides, I realised, it would only add to his rage.

‘I saw your brothers yesterday,' I said. ‘Robert and I headed down to Glommen after it happened. If you hadn't been ill we would have knocked for you.'

‘What did you see?'

‘Nothing in particular. They were just there... '

‘Where was that?'

‘By the hut. Shall we meet up this weekend? You sound like you're better now.'

‘I can't. I've got some stuff to do.'

‘What stuff?'

‘Nothing in particular.'

His voice sounded odd again. I couldn't say exactly how, but something was not right.

‘Have you had your phone switched off at home?' I asked.

‘Eh?'

‘I've been ringing every day since Wednesday, but nobody answered.'

‘I had a temperature. Over 39 degrees. The phone is downstairs. I couldn't get up and answer it.'

‘What about your mum and dad then? Or your brothers?'

‘I've really got to go now,' said Tommy. ‘I'll see you on Monday'

‘Can't we keep talking a little longer? I need some help to think.'

‘Some other time, Nella, I'll see you around... '

There was a click on the line. I was utterly confused.

I
t had stopped raining when my brother and I rode our bikes down Solrosvägen that morning. There were a few lads playing hockey in front of the shop. A bunch of teenagers came roller-skating down from the E6. Early-rising fathers were out washing their cars. They stood in their driveways with their hoses and sponges, with cigarettes in the corner of their mouths and impenetrable expressions. Behind the curtains in the detached houses, families sat eating breakfast and children looked forward to the day – games, trips into town and crisps in front of the TV that evening. It could have been us sitting there, I thought, in a parallel universe our physics teacher told us about, where everything looked exactly the same as in this one, only with tiny differences, like all right-handed people would be left-handed, or everyone who had brown eyes would have blue eyes instead. But something had gone wrong, and Robert and I had drawn the short straw as usual.

My plan was to start at Junior Centre, a clothing shop in Nygatan. People's child benefit had just been paid for the month, so it would be packed in there. Girls and boys around my age, with parents bringing up the rear with their wallets wide open. People from nice families who would never set foot in discount stores. Besides, they had stuff that would be easy to convert into cash. A reversible Mickey Mouse sweatshirt would sell for thirty kronor at school, and a pair of brand-name jeans for double that. Pricier clothes brought better returns, but they were also monitored more closely. I would start there and then continue on to the shops closer to the centre of town.

‘We'll start with JC,' I told my brother. ‘I'll tell you exactly what you need to do... '

Nobody paid us any notice as we went in through the door. There was a guy in his twenties standing behind the counter, bagging up purchases at the till. Two other shop assistants were helping people over by the changing rooms. There was a queue; kids were waiting with jeans and sweaters in their arms. My brother stayed by the entrance while I went round and did a recce.

JC was quite small inside. There were no mirrors on the ceiling for the simple reason that they were not needed; the entire shop was in plain view, with no concealed angles or dark corners. Light entered en masse via the display windows facing Köpmansgatan. In the middle of the shop was the jeans display, with piles of Dobbers and Levi's. There were sweaters and T-shirts on a shelf behind them. I went back over to my brother.

‘I want you to take a pair of Dobber jeans and roll them up so the label doesn't show. And then pick up some T-shirts and join the queue for the changing rooms. Can you manage that?'

‘What do I do when I get there?'

‘Just go in, close the door behind you and stay in there until I get there and go in the next cubicle. When I knock on the wall, you hand the jeans to me, I'll give you a pair of reduced-price jeans which you then take out and put back on the pile. It's foolproof – they can't nab you for anything because you won't have anything on you.'

‘What about you?'

‘Don't worry about me. See you out by the bikes afterwards.'

I watched him slink off towards the jeans display. A shop assistant watched him with a beady eye.

They had the last of the summer clothes on a clearance table. I found a pair of cheap jeans and took them over to the area where the brand-name trousers were. Next I picked up a pair of medium-size Dobbers and a couple of sweatshirts that were hanging on an adjacent rack. Then I went over to the winter coats and pretended to look at the price tags. As far as I could tell, no one was watching us. Store detectives generally attempted to look
like ordinary customers, maybe holding a pair of socks in their hand while they discreetly observed people. And they were always dressed in plain clothes. I knew all that even though I'd never been caught myself. I knew about that sort of stuff – who were the thieves and who were the cops out there.

Ten minutes later we were in the changing rooms, in adjacent cubicles. It smelled like the school changing room after PE class: a peculiar mix of sweat and deodorant. I tapped lightly on the divider wall. My brother obediently handed over his jeans and got a pair of cheap ones from the clearance table in return. I pulled on the Dobbers and then my own kecks from the discount store over them. I heard him open the door and knew that the shop assistants would be eyeing him suspiciously, even though he emerged with the same number of items he had gone in with, and that they would continue to observe him as he put them back in their places, the odd little guy with the taped-together glasses, and while that was happening I just had to open my door and walk out as if nothing had happened – they would barely even notice me...

A minute later I was back out on the street. My brother was waiting for me by the cycle racks, just as we had agreed.

‘Where've you got the jeans?' he asked.

‘Under my other ones.'

He gave a whistle.

‘What a pro. So what do we do now?'

‘We carry on until we're done.'

As we cycled off towards the Kronan shopping centre, I pondered my next move. Cheap or expensive stuff? There were pros and cons with each. Something like bottles of Date perfume, for example, I'd be able to sell with no effort at all. Almost all the girls at school used that. Most mornings in the common room you could hardly breathe for all the Date Anna or Date Natalie the girls had been spraying over themselves. They were in the department stores and were easy to nick. The problem was that they
were cheap and wouldn't bring in more than a tenner for a bottle, which meant that I'd really have to make an effort to accumulate a sizable amount.

Brand-name clothes were a completely different matter. The school snobs were mad for Pringle and Lacoste. They had them at Johansson Brothers, but the shop assistants there kept a close eye on everything that cost over a hundred kronor. Maybe, I thought, it might be worth the risk if my brother went in first and attracted their attention, asked some stupid question about autumn fashions or if he could please use the customer toilet. If I was lucky, nobody would notice me, I could hide behind an older customer, sneak over to the Lacoste sweaters in the corner and get hold of one before they could react.

Actually, I didn't like nicking stuff. I only did it in emergencies. I could sort of see Dad in myself whenever I stole something, and I didn't like the idea that we might be similar; that we might feel the same things or think the same way.