The Merman (6 page)

And it looked like a pigsty down here. Sorry to mention it, but you'd puked in the hall... '

I could hear how that sounded: crazy. And yet it was true.

She got up and went over to the wall calendar. She was incapable of taking in what I had said, or else she didn't remember anything. I was happy about that, because I couldn't bear her guilty conscience.

‘What day is it today?' she asked.

‘Friday.'

‘Dad will come home in three weeks' time. I want you to move in with Robert then. You'll have to share a room for a while.'

‘How come?'

‘We're short of money. Dad and I have decided to let out the ground floor, so we'll have to make your room into the TV room. We need to be able to watch TV, don't we?'

She opened the fridge door and took out a beer, then looked out of the window. It had started to rain – a heavy, steady Halland rain.

‘Who's going to move in?'

A mate of Dad's. They're getting released at the same time, and he has nowhere to live. He'll pay half the rent.'

‘Do you know him?'

‘No, but Dad does.'

‘So he could just be any lunatic.'

‘Please, there's nothing to discuss.'

It didn't matter what arguments I came up with, because never
in her life would she question Dad's decision. I didn't want to start crying in front of her. There is nothing I hate about myself more than when I start to blubber. I cannot afford tears. They are precious, and you can't waste them if you're in my situation. The mere thought of one of Dad's jailbird mates in the apartment made me feel ill. And my room was pretty much the only thing I had. If I locked the door around me, any kind of storm could blow up outside and I wouldn't care.

‘Come here, let me comfort you,' Mum said.

And once again, I viewed the situation as if from outside: a woman with greasy, straggly hair, with her lipstick smeared halfway across her cheek, reeking like a sick old dog, a mother who lifts up the tab on a can of strong beer, downs half of it in one gulp as she extends her hand to her fifteen-year-old daughter to
comfort her
.

I did start to bawl, even though I didn't want to. Like a little child. Bawled and bawled until my body felt completely exhausted, drained of all liquid, like a dry old loaf of bread.

I
t's not easy to piece together the bits of Mum and Dad's lives because they don't like to talk about themselves. Dad comes from a village near Umeå, as far as I know. He got kicked out of the house when he turned sixteen. He had ended up falling in with a bad crowd, he once told me, and his parents wouldn't put up with it. Grandad worked in forestry up there, and both he and Grandma were teetotallers and very religious. They fell out, and after Dad left they never saw each other again.

For a few years he roamed around with no fixed address. He lived in a boarding house for single men in Stockholm for a while, then spent time in Borås and Norrköping, and a while down in Karlskrona, where he worked at a boatyard. Then he headed to Gothenburg to look for a job.

He found employment at a small factory that made trawler nets for the fishing industry and camouflage nets for the army. He travelled all over the west coast of Sweden to deliver them: small crayfish nets and big mackerel nets, and even bigger cod nets with panels that let the by-catch out before the net is raised. That's how he ended up in Falkenberg a couple of times a year. The factory had customers in Glommen and Träslövsläge, and he met a load of people around here, including the crowd that Mum hung around with.

Mum had just turned eighteen when Dad showed up at a party in town, and she fell head over heels in love. She was training to become a seamstress in those days and was living as a lodger with a family in Falkenberg. At weekends she would go back to Okome, the village where my gran lived. The weekend she met Dad she
was actually supposed to be there, but there was a snowstorm, and the bus that went to Ätradalen had been cancelled. So instead she went to a party with some friends from school, and a few of them had boyfriends who were fishermen. One of them brought Dad along, and that's how they met. That same evening they went out dancing. Dad paid for everything; he was dressed like a gangster, Mum had told me, in a suit and hat, and he must have stood out from everyone else. It's amazing to think, but she was only three years older than I am now.

They continued to meet up whenever Dad's route brought him to the area, and within a year she was pregnant. I don't think they really wanted to become parents. Dad liked going round the west coast as a free man, selling nets and trawls, and conducting shady deals on the side. And Mum was really too young.

When she got knocked up, she quit school and took a job at the same factory where Gran worked. She moved back into her old room at home and lived there until Dad quit his job and moved down here. They rented a ramshackle house in the village. Dad got a job at a timber yard. Then I entered the world.

After a few years the removal van headed to Vinberg, much closer to town. They had had a feud with Gran, who thought that Dad was going to ruin Mum's life. They were already drinking quite a lot in those days; social services came round and investigated; there was talk of my going to live with Gran or to stay with a foster family, but ultimately it came to nothing. Dad had also made himself unwelcome at work, got into fights and served a stretch for possession of narcotics. When he came out, he had no desire to take a regular job. He had contacts down at the docks, would buy vodka and diet pills from the Polish ships and sell them to shady characters throughout Halland. I know all this because I happened to find a box containing old court judgments and appeals in his wardrobe.

Robert was born just after I turned two. It was around Christmas, several months early. He had to stay in an incubator in the hospital
in Varberg. Mum and I would go there to look after him. I have vague memories of a little doll asleep in an oxygen tent, a doll with loads of tubes and drips in his arms that you wanted to stroke, even though it was prohibited. You weren't allowed to touch him, and you could hardly talk when you were in the vicinity. Nobody knew if he was going to make it. The doctors couldn't say anything for certain, so we had to take it one day at a time. Dad never came along. By that time his criminal career had taken off.

I have clear memories of events from the time I was four. I remember the week when we got evicted from our flat in Vinberg and had to move into a council flat in town. And the night when the police entered the flat and turned everything upside down in their hunt for stolen goods, and how strange it felt because in everyone else's world the police are nice, helpful people. Another time I watched as Dad got beaten up by two blokes he owed money to. It was a summer evening when they rang the doorbell, and when Mum opened the door they chucked her aside like an old rag and headed straight for the sofa, where Dad sat watching TV with Robert and me on his lap. They hit him with a bottle and kicked him as he lay there. I don't know what possessed me, but I tried to protect my brother by grabbing hold of one of the men's legs. They didn't even notice me, just carried on punching and kicking until Mum came rushing in with her purse and they emptied it of all the banknotes and disappeared.

I have a load of sick memories like that. Of parties where total strangers turn up and stay for several days and engage in marathon drinking sessions, and when one passes out the next takes over, so it's basically never quiet at home. There's always someone left to carry on while the others rest up for the next shift. People whose names nobody knows, because they're only there once and then disappear, never to resurface, or ones whose names you do know, perversely enough, because they're sort of regulars at the end of the month when the benefits are paid. People who don't give a damn about your existence, who attempt to appear interested or
concerned with a wine bottle in their hand, who knock on the door to your room and say, ‘How ya doing in there little girl, hope we're not disturbing you.' They're actually worse than the ones who are complete bastards, because with bastards you at least know what you're dealing with: disgusting blokes who try to touch you up or undress you with their eyes. One time I heard my mum when some guy suggested we should have a shower together. She went completely mental and chased him out with a bread knife. Even so, the nice ones are almost worse – the ones who say they feel sorry for you, even though they're trashing the place just like the rest of them. And the sick thing is that you end up believing that's how things have to be, that it's normal to have a load of drunks in your house who try to come in and make small talk with you as if it were the most natural thing in the world:
How old are you, little girl? How are things at school?
Or with a trembling voice, they'll say they think it's disgusting that we have to put up with people like themselves.

Shortly after I turned six we moved out of our flat in Falkenberg. The house constituted a health hazard. There was mould in the bathroom and kitchen. The wallpaper had started to come off the walls, and the lino was curling up in the corners. It smelled musty, and the smell of mould even permeated our clothes. Mum complained to social services until out of pure pity they sorted out a place in the newly built maisonettes in Skogstorp. That's how we ended up here. I was going to start school that autumn, and I remember I was happy about it. Even though I was just little, I went round hoping that our circumstances would change for the better.

And they actually did, at first. It was nice here then. Everything was brand new. There was a playground nearby, and the street was surrounded by trees and flowers. It was as if Mum and Dad had been given a new opportunity, and they realised and were prepared to seize it. Mum made some curtains and bought furniture from the charity shop. My brother and I each got our own room. I'll
never forget the day when they showed me where we were going to live. A whole room of my own with a fitted wardrobe and a view out over the street. It didn't really matter that the walls were paper-thin, that everything was built from the cheapest materials and that when somebody went to the toilet downstairs you could hear it throughout the whole apartment. Mum and I hung up a Bamse Bear poster together, and I got a new bed and new sheets with a Pippi Longstocking design on them. Dad happened to have some money. He had made a few deals and had also got a job at a mink farm in Olofsbo. That was in the summer, and sometimes my brother and I got to go there along with him. I don't know why I have such strong memories of that. Maybe because normally he hardly ever talked to us, kept himself to himself and looked at us as if we were strangers who just happened to end up under the same roof. And then suddenly he was transformed: open, almost happy. He had got a job he wanted to show us: the long mink sheds with no walls, with a saddle roof to keep the rain out; the silky animals who looked so friendly, almost like cuddly toys, five to a cage. Lovely animals, but dangerous. You mustn't stick your fingers into the cages because they could easily bite off a child's finger. You mustn't forget they are wild animals, Dad said. One of his tasks was to prepare the feed. He fetched fish silage from the boats down in Glommen and chicken innards from Torsåsen and mixed them with flour and water and ground it all down into mink feed. He stayed sober during that time, except during skinning. Then they all drank at the mink farm, to endure the blood and the smell of flayed animal carcasses.

That first year in Skogstorp I hardly ever needed to look after my brother. Mum was at home. Dad was working and avoided his old acquaintances. Four days a week Robert went to nursery, and that autumn I started at school.

I've saved that first class photo, and it's strange to see everyone there, just six or seven years old, like little prototypes of themselves.
Peder and Gerard are standing in the back row, showing the gaps in their milk teeth, already best friends back then, both wearing Lee jeans and denim jackets. They are about half their current size but still to scale; shrunken in time. I am crouching at the bottom over to the left, attempting to smile, as if I don't really know how.

It may not be evident from this school photo, but the fact is that I was an outsider from the very first day. Nobody teased me or did anything in particular, but it was just as if I didn't exist. Perhaps Mum and Dad's reputation had accompanied me all the way into the classroom? Perhaps the other parents had asked their kids to stay away from my brother and me? Or maybe it was because we lived in the new maisonettes on Liljevägen, which were viewed as a sort of slum where social services cases lived, and everyone else lived in detached houses or proper terraced houses with well-kept gardens; or the fact that I constantly went round in hideous clothes and my hair was straggly because my mum had forgotten to buy shampoo. As I remember it, I didn't care. Life had actually got much easier since we'd moved here.

When I was in Year Four, Dad owed somebody some money and stole in order to pay the debt. He ended up inside again, only for three months that time, but it was enough to put us back to square one. I remember when we visited him that autumn in Halmstad. That was the first time I'd been in a prison, and people were very nice to us. A female prison guard took Robert and me to a playroom where we would have to wait. We were given cheese sandwiches and squash, and while Mum was with Dad in the visiting room, the woman explained what a prison is. I didn't listen too closely because there were loads of toys in there, and then we got crayons and paper to draw on while we were waiting. I still have one of the drawings. It shows Dad in what I imagined was a prison uniform: black and white striped, the way they look in comics. Later, when he came down to us accompanied by a screw, I realised it wasn't
like that. He was wearing the same tracksuit as at home, with a T-shirt underneath, sockless in a pair of brown sandals.