Going Loco (12 page)

He paused for a reaction, so Linda nodded. Her attention had certainly been caught by the story, but there was something else. ‘I’ve just noticed,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind. You’re talking normal English.’

‘Yes, of course. I think I’ve explained by now. I’m not Swedish.’

‘It’s a relief,’ she said.

He laughed, mirthlessly. ‘You’re telling me.’

‘So who was Stefan Johansson?’

‘Oh, yes. Who was he? What can I tell you of Stefan Johansson? At this time, he was a stringy young human-chemistry student at the nearby university at Lund, rather charming, blond, in a ragged beige suit, who had just completed eighteen months cleaning toilets as a penance for refusing to undertake military service, and had no money to play blackjack. That’s what he told me. He pulled his pockets out to prove it. “But I’ve got a system,” he said, in good English. “And because I’m a mathematical genius, I can memorize the cards. How much money do you have?” I told him the truth: I had five thousand kronor, or about five hundred pounds. I had cashed all my savings at home, and sold the car I’d had at seventeen. “Then I’ll show you what I can do in this dump,” he said, indicating the bar. “And then I’ll take you to a club I know. We’ll split everything fifty-fifty. Agreed?” And heaven help me, I agreed.

‘So I led him back to the card table, where Carl, the dealer, greeted us. And I gave Stefan fifty kronor, and over the next two hours I won steadily with small amounts while he bet boldly and quadrupled his stake. For a student, he was an excellent gambler. I had always thought the art of the card table was concealing how little confidence you have in your hand, disguising your dismay. But with Stefan the art was to conceal his certain knowledge of every card on the table. He bet just the right amount not to draw attention to himself, and
quit with perfect timing. He gave me half the winnings, and then we went outside.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. He was leading me through grand squares southwards, across canals, away from the sea. The buildings were closing in, and it was late.

‘The Möllevångstorget,’ he said.

‘Easy for you to say,’ I quipped, little thinking how the name would in time be impressed on my memory.

‘But when we got there, on this occasion – to the Möllevångstorget, or the Möllevången Square – I remember only a blur of impressions. An unsavoury neighbourhood, scary, the smell of incense and pot, and the ugliest statue I ever saw, of a group of straining, naked people holding an enormous boulder above their heads. It was a monument to the workers, apparently, but I always thought it was rather odd for a town whose most famous landmark was a gigantic crane. Anyway, Stefan knocked on a door. An illegal betting club, where they knew him well.

‘“Who’s your lucky charm this time, Stefan?” they said. I didn’t understand. All I do know is that he turned my five thousand kronor into twenty thousand. How we got out of there without being attacked I don’t recall. But as we stood beside a canal at dawn, what I do remember is that he took only a handful of the winnings.

‘“We were going to split everything fifty-fifty,” I reminded him.

‘“What’s the point?” he said. “Are you staying in Malmö?”

‘“No.”

‘“So. It’s no good to me on my own. I don’t have your luck.”

‘He disappeared from my life as abruptly as he’d entered it, and for twenty years I enjoyed and increased my fortune. Then, five years ago exactly, Stefan Johansson reeled me in.

‘I didn’t even recognize the name at first, when he phoned
me in Stockholm. I had stayed in Sweden, you see. I had made my fortune there, in the export of household design items, and just sent money back to Kent, where my family still has the orchards. He said on the phone, “I’m the man who made you” – which should have alerted me to his state of mind, I suppose. It was a remarkable choice of phrase, as I considered myself self-made. But, on the other hand, success has a thousand fathers, and many people have taken the credit for my achievements over the years. I had come to accept it as an aspect of human nature.

‘He told me he had given up gambling years before, and was now a respectable scientist, working in genetic research. I attempted a few pleasantries, which failed. Small talk did not engage him. Urgently, he wanted to see me again, in Malmö. He had problems with his work and his wife was ill. Had I married? he asked. I said no, which seemed to annoy him. Any children by other means? Not that I knew of. Come anyway, he said. I was intrigued, I admit it. That long-ago night in Malmö was like a dream. So I invented some spurious business in the south-west, hired a plane, and flew down.

‘We met again at the Bar Central, just for old times’ sake. Neither of us recognized the other at first. He had aged badly since that summer night in 1971 – his back was curved, and his long hair was tied back in a grey pony-tail. My prosperity, meanwhile, had lifted me into a different world, where it is customary to look younger than your years. People now said I looked like Sting, which was pleasant. Stefan asked me to outline my career, which I did, although it was unnerving when he kept saying, “I knew it!” and thumping the table. What about his own life, his own work? It was hard to get him to talk about it. He said his wife Ingrid disapproved of his research methods, from which I assumed he worked with live animals. “Many women have soft hearts about laboratory experiments,” I said. He agreed. “They like to think dumb
suffering is unnecessary,” he scoffed. “They take the view that no scientific progress in the world is worth an ounce of pain.”

‘Gradually, inevitably, our conversation turned to that interesting night when Stefan won the money and gave it to me. I assumed he wanted money, people generally did. So I said that if he had financial difficulties, I would gladly give him the money I owed him. If only it had been that simple.

‘“Your money? You think I want your money? I could have had your whole life, don’t you see that?” he said. He seemed very angry. “You’re so stupid you don’t see it. We were the same age, we looked alike, we had the same prospects. In those days, if we had looked in the mirror, we’d have seen each other! Now look at us. But I lacked something you had. Tell me what I have, George. What am I good at?”

‘I said that, from what I knew, he was good at gambling, and had a superb analytical brain, also a photographic memory.

‘“And what else does a gambler need? What else does everyone need in life? What divides the haves and the have-nots more than any other factor in the world?”

‘“Money,” I said.

‘“No.”

‘“Charm. Good breeding. A secure childhood in the Garden of England. A resemblance to an international film star.”

‘He took me by the shoulders. “Luck.”

‘I shrugged. I couldn’t believe he meant it. Luck happens, I said.

‘“Yes,” he said. “But only to those who are genetically predisposed to it.” He punched the wall, rather alarmingly, grazing his knuckles. And then he added: “Like you.”’

Stefan (or George) took a long swig of wine while Linda put another log on the fire. A high wind raged outside. Unspoken between them was the knowledge that Belinda, upstairs, had been avidly reading this sort of Gothic story for the past three
years and making it her speciality. Were she ever to know the truth of Stefan’s background, or that he had shared his narrative with the cleaning lady, she was likely to gnaw off her own leg with rage.

‘So why was Stefan telling you all this?’ asked Linda. She had curled herself small on the sofa, and was holding a cushion across her chest as a kind of shield. If something nasty was going to happen in this story, she wanted to hide behind the maximum amount of upholstery.

‘Well, he was mad, you see,’ said Belinda’s husband, matter-of-factly. ‘Quite insane. He started to outline his research, how for years he had been working to prove luck was genetically transmitted. In opposition to Darwinian orthodoxy, he argued that luck alone was the basis of evolutionary selection. So we talked on, and the bar grew hotter, and every so often he would pull at my hand or my arm, literally pinching bits of flesh. Once he picked a hair off my jacket and laughingly said, “Can I keep this? It might help me get safely across the road.”

‘I couldn’t make him see things differently. Rational counter-argument simply incensed him. He said, quite simply, that I had the luck gene, and that it would be his life’s achievement to locate it. Which was when I lost my temper, finally. I stood up and threw down some money for the bill. Luck gene? I said I’d had enough of this. “You’re raving mad,” I told him. And I marched outside into the cool night air, with Stefan scampering behind me.

‘Walking into the main square, I calmed down. Children played in a fountain, women laughed. It was all so normal that I thought fondly of Stockholm, and how I would be home again next morning. This sad, grey man at my side would be soon forgotten. If not, his crazy ideas would provide amusing chat for a dinner party, nothing more. It occurred to me to feel sorry for him. Being the object of envy has its consolations. Though he might want my DNA, he simply couldn’t have
it, could he? I certainly couldn’t give it to him. His envy was therefore a merely futile, self-sabotaging emotion. The more he hated me, the more he hurt himself.

‘“Will you come to my house?” he said. “Ingrid would like to meet you. I told her you looked like a movie star.”

‘“Did you?”

‘“Yes. She’s looking forward to it.”

‘And so a susceptibility to flattery was my real undoing. I already had a soft spot for Ingrid, since she disapproved of her husband’s work, and so did I. But I went to see her, if I’m honest, because I believed she would find me good-looking, and after the abysmal evening I’d had with Stefan, I needed a boost. Also, having lived in Sweden for twenty years, I recognized what a rare honour it was to be invited home.

‘“Where do you live?” I asked, as we headed south again. Despite the influx of immigrants changing the shops, despite the substantial rebuilding of the city, familiar landmarks were passing. In the darkness ahead, I spotted those awful naked bums and the boulder, and I can’t say the sight reassured me. We were in the Möllevången Square, once more.

‘He produced a key, opened a door, and there was Ingrid, finally. We found her in the sitting room of their anonymous ground-floor apartment – a dull little woman, dark-haired, sour, and I knew at once the mistake I’d made. She was not a Terence Stamp fan. She just looked up at me without much interest, and said to her husband, “You were right. This one’s better-looking.” And when I turned to Stefan to ask him what she meant, he struck me on the head with a Carl Larsson reproduction he had snatched from the wall. I staggered, and he struck me again. I saw blood on my shoes before I passed out. I have never liked the saccharine work of Carl Larsson, incidentally. This scene, as you can imagine, did very little to boost him in my estimation.

‘Concussed, I was bundled into a makeshift laboratory
in the cellar, where – well, where I was subsequently kept imprisoned, the subject of innumerable experiments, for the next eighteen months. Yes, eighteen months in a room that stank of rat poison and surgical spirit! My life snapped shut on that night in Malmö. I guessed Stefan would kill me, sooner or later, because his experiments would fail. How I survived those terrible times is a miracle to me, even now.’

Belinda’s husband had been staring at the fire as he spoke. Now he turned to Linda, who shut her mouth when she realized it was hanging open.

‘You don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘You think I’m making it up.’

‘Stefan,’ she said gently, her face contorted with pity. Tears were in her eyes. ‘Oh, how terrible. Condemned to death by your own luck!’ She reflected on it and patted his hand. ‘What an irony!’

‘Mm,’ he replied. He had stopped being struck by the irony of it quite some time ago. ‘I never understood the science of his work, but suffice to say the luck gene stayed lucky. It evaded all Stefan’s attempts to find it. I soon realized that Ingrid had been the cause of his obsession with genetic defect – hardly blessed by her own genetic inheritance, she had nevertheless refused to reproduce with a man who had no lucky aspect anywhere in his double helix. I think, to her, DNA was something like astrology. Since I was mostly shackled, I was obliged to converse with her for hours by the clock, and I can honestly say I never met anybody so unpleasant in my life. She was selfish and moody, and got her own way by crying. “Oh, Stefan,” she would weep to her husband, “I’m so unhappy!” God, I hated her. She started to fall in love with me, of course. Wanting my babies was what this was all about from the start. “How lucky is this?” I wanted to point out to Stefan. “Your dwarfish wife now lusts for my helpless body! How bloody lucky is this?”

‘I don’t know what they did with the bits they cut off. To be fair, they were clever and discreet in removing only tiny little bits that wouldn’t show – from the back of the ear, or the inner thigh, or the underside of a toe. All I know is that Stefan would go out to test his luck after injecting himself with something derived from me – and come back every time poorer, or beaten up. Once he was so sure he had isolated my luck gene that he played chicken with the traffic and got run over. My luck was simply not transferable, it seemed. Meanwhile Stefan still went to great lengths to convince me of his theory, making me read his thesis on the biology of chance and testing me on it. Oddly, he seemed to place no value on his work if I didn’t subscribe to it. Ingrid alternately provoked and pouted – taunting him in front of me, and then weeping when he hit her. And when we were alone together, she would paw my face and caress my body, saying she never stopped thinking about me, she loved me, she wanted me.

‘I suppose I had been there a year by then. Kept mentally alive by
Monty Python
reruns that they let me watch on the telly. Entertained by watching the rats die, and by observing that Stefan’s cuts and bruises were generally far worse than mine. They gave me reindeer sandwiches every day, which I can never forgive. Can you imagine what it’s like, day after day for a whole year, trying to think of a joke that starts “I’ll have a reindeer sandwich and make it – what?” You wouldn’t think so, but it was this chronic inability to make a joke out of a reindeer sandwich that, throughout my captivity, brought me closest to despair.