SON: Besides, it’s sewn from organic material. Certified.
(The mother makes an open sandwich and feeds the SON. Helps him drink from a glass. Suddenly she turns to face the audience.)
MOTHER: Can anyone help me?
(The mother goes back to her knitting as if nothing has happened.)
FATHER: Our stocks in African Fishing Trade have gone up.
SON: I’m out of here.
MOTHER: Don’t you have a late morning today?
SON: I won’t make it if I don’t leave now. (Points at the rubber shackle between his ankles)
FATHER: Watch out for cars and paedophiles.
(The son hurries off, taking little shuffling steps, and vanishes offstage.)
MOTHER: What stocks?
FATHER: The business concept is brilliant. Five hundred tons of filleted Nile perch per day are exported to Europe. They’ve managed to lower costs by using cheap Russian pilots and old freight aeroplanes. And the offal and fish-heads are left over for the local population, so those who say that the introduced Nile perch has killed off all the other fish in Lake Victoria will just have to shut up. Nobody’s going to come and say that African Fishing Trade aren’t doing their share. Besides, the young people can heat up the glue in the fish-crates and sniff it, so they’ll sleep better in the alleys at night. Their parents have all died of AIDS anyway. It’s a win-win situation for all concerned. We can thank our lucky stars we were in on it from the beginning and bought shares.
(They sit in silence. Suddenly the father turns to the audience.)
FATHER: Can anyone help me?
Kristoffer leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. He wasn’t completely satisfied. Something in the play didn’t sound quite right, and there were only four weeks left till the deadline. His eyes left the screen and sought out the mobile phone, which was turned off. He picked it up and weighed it in his hand. For a week he’d been cut off from the outside world, but the number of pages he’d been able to produce was still alarmingly small. It just wasn’t flowing. There was so much he wanted to say, but the words seemed stuck, as if screwed down in a space he couldn’t access. Isolation was usually the key. The freedom that opened up after he shut off his telephones and stopped checking his e-mail. The feeling of independence. An inviolable wild man with the right to spew his bile over the societal structure from which he had chosen to remove himself. This time it hadn’t worked. Instead he had felt lonely and cooped-up. And detached. Not detached the way he usually felt, when as an observer he registered what was happening though he wasn’t taking part; and with his moral irreproachability of the past three years, he had a right to criticise.
Instead he felt detached, as in lonely.
He wondered whether it had to do with the money. Each month a varying amount was sent to him from an anonymous giver, but this month it hadn’t come.
He closed the screen on his laptop and went into the kitchen. Opened the fridge, then the freezer. The number of frozen meals had run low, and he needed to go shopping. Maybe he should give Jesper a ring. Grab a quick bite and talk for a while. Jesper, who at the risk of coming down with scurvy was struggling with his novel the way Kristoffer was struggling with his new script.
A year had passed since the little theatre had produced his first play. Provocative, some critics had called it. Others had claimed that it was insistent. He took that as a good sign. Several of the performances had sold out. He had sat there in the dark and mouthed the words spoken on the stage. No one could hear him, but in his head his voice had been exultant. And when the applause came he was always filled with the same wish.
Imagine if my parents could see me.
Now the theatre wanted a new play, and he had promised to deliver it in a month. It was a matter of producing something new yet retaining his distinct style. To attack, yet soften the blows so that only after a while would a hole open up and the criticism could slyly slink in. Human nature went on the defensive if it was ambushed. That was something in the genes. But the rage and frustration he felt about the state of everything made it hard to hold back.
He picked up the cordless phone from the kitchen worktop and punched in Jesper’s number. He wasn’t ready yet to turn on his mobile. Then the spell would be broken for good, and he needed to get down another few pages before he gave up for the day.
‘Hey, it’s me. Where are you?’
‘I’m down at Café Neo. How about hanging out for a few?’
He hesitated only a second, then gave in.
‘Okay, I’ll be there in ten.’
He went out to the hall and pulled on his trainers and duffel coat. He left the umbrella after a glance out of the window; it had stopped raining. He locked the door and chose to walk down the stairs; he needed the exercise after sitting for a week. He let his hand glide along the banister. Let himself be filled by the ambivalent feeling at the thought that so many hands had glided there before his. That he was a part of the whole. That everything belonged together, but everyone had his own responsibility, and he had realised that he had to start carrying his own. It was the idea that had guided each step for the past three years.
His new journey had begun then, when as a 32-year-old bartender he was standing behind a bar in Åre and felt that he could no longer breathe. He realised that he was about to go under. He had looked about among the drunken people and ascertained that the total IQ in the pub corresponded to that in the ape house at Kolmården Zoo. With the crushing difference that the inhabitants of the ape house behaved with more dignity. It was as though a cloudy lens had been removed. He had suddenly felt like an alien from outer space who wanted to know how we intelligent humans lived our lives here on Earth. Everything had all at once become inexplicable. He had seen all the fumbling attempts. All the bullshit that never led anywhere except possibly to people staggering home to a rented hotel room where they could screw in drunken abandon.
The bunch of girls on the other side of the bar, the ones who had told him the night before that they were studying nursing together and were there on their annual trip; their shocking pink T-shirts with the slogan I’M HERE FOR THE GANGBANG; the conversation some of them were trying to have with three muscle-bound men who had a hard time standing up straight – all desperate padding, people who were trying to endure although something was missing. And he and his colleagues who facilitated the idiocy that was going on, dressed in uniforms emblazoned with distillers’ names, they kept serving more shots, beer and brightly coloured cocktails to people who were already so drunk they could barely lift the glass to their lips. Yet they had chosen this condition voluntarily.
They were having fun.
The revelation that he was definitely one of them.
He stopped at a crossing and pressed the button. Across the street a van with a beer logo along its side had stopped to unload grey barrels outside a restaurant. Two men from the staff wrestled the heavy metal cylinders in through the door. In the next few days the contents would enter an unknown number of human brains in their hunt for peace of mind.
For thirteen years this had been his life. Visby in the summertime and Åre in the winter. Après-beach and aprèsski parties were deceptively similar. Released on holiday, people had to make up for all the lost time; the caveman in them was set free for a while to get some air. After the workday was over he would join in the fun. Seasonal work was a lifestyle that possessed everything for maintaining a distance from a dull contemptible life, that of some faceless suit with a mundane routine. Parties that started at closing time and went on till morning, a few hours’ sleep so you could handle the evening shift that lasted till the next party started. A superficial life in which he let himself float away like a feather on the breeze. It all went so fast, so fast, and depended on the whim of a second. A constant search for kicks, a blissful mixture of sex, alcohol and other drugs. Just as long as it heightened his sense of being alive and raised him above mediocrity, silencing what was tearing at his soul because he didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was ready for anything, and if something did go wrong it was always possible to blame his blood alcohol level. He had taken the trouble to become a member of the ‘ski club’, the ones who had sex in the small gondola lift. He’d become a dangerous competitor in the beer-chugging contests and the riskiest off-piste runs. He’d stood in queues to hotel rooms where girls had set up a system with guys writing their names on condoms that were then placed in a cooler in the corridor while awaiting their turn. He’d taken penicillin for chlamydia and on one occasion was admitted to the hospital with kidney pains after weeks of hard partying. In countless places he’d woken up covered in his own vomit, yet he couldn’t remember how he’d got there. He’d done things that afterwards had filled him with shame. But nothing had made him question his behaviour. Life had been a closed cocoon unaffected by the world outside. There was nothing but the night’s escapades and the morning’s remorse. The hellish anxiety that came with the hangover, which nothing but the hair of the dog could remedy.