“Maybe I went away because I wanted to be with people who were called Jack, Vanessa, Andy, and Catherine.” Sometimes Ulla still stands there in her room, on the Glitter Scene. The glass doors open, the white dress flapping in the window. Singing a song, “Death’s spell at a young age,” that one, another one? Or just stands, looking out at everything.
Then it is over, everything is normal. The door is closed, Ulla leaves the window. The curtains, like a theater curtain, are pulled closed again.
And still, often, just darkness, the bird has flown the coop.
But sometimes when Johanna stands alone at the edge of the woods and looks up at the Glitter Scene she imagines that she is there. With Ulla on the Glitter Scene, the theater, the dance, the music… no, not like that.
But so. “Maybe I went away because I wanted to be with people who were called…” Ulla and Johanna with the Marsh Queen, all of her songs. “And now you’re going to get to hear what it sounds like.” How Johanna is going to come to Ulla Bäckström in her room, and they are going to listen to it up there.
Death’s spell at a young age. They are going to be Orpheus who goes to the Underworld, the Winter Garden, bring back Eurydice. Their Project Earth. The Marsh Queen, the Winter Garden, the American girl in a snow globe, how everything is going to coincide.
They will have Project Earth. They will have everything. The two of them.
Patti, Debbie, Ametiste, Imagine, my Rimbaud and the Piss Factory. Screaming Toys and Wembley Arena 2012, everything will lead there.
“Being on stage is so terrible, they tear you to bits with their admiring looks, admiring hands, you could just die…” To talk like that in an interview, sign autographs.
Or like that. Just like that. Listen to the Marsh Queen and her songs. The Marsh Queen’s voice, mellow like Ulla’s, but even darker and more mysterious. “Lie down here,” Ulla Bäckström will say on the Glitter Scene while the song is playing, “and we’ll dissect the Marsh Queen’s inner life, all her dark corners… close your eyes…” And the insects, the butterflies, will glitter in her hair there on the Glitter Scene, among the music, the books, all the music and the dress up clothes, all the manuscripts.
But when that song has finished playing, new songs will come. And Ulla will sit up and shake the butterflies from her hair, klirr klirr as metal and velvet rain down on the floor around her.
The Glitter Scene is my life. New songs, other songs, their own songs.
Well. Just a story, a fantasy. It does not happen. Nothing happens, in reality. Aside from time passing, months, years. Robin who moves, Tobias who dies, the greenhouse that deteriorates on the side of the road. It becomes the fall of 2006, the months of October and November. A glimpse of a stranger in the Boundary Woods. She is called the Red One, a woman in her fifties, and she wears red clothes.
The Red One, from the Winter Garden.
The American girl in a snow globe. Sometimes Johanna thinks about it too. Lonely thoughts. Two characters in a watery landscape. Don’t push your love too far, Eddie. Ulla on the Glitter Scene, Johanna down below at the edge of the woods, alone like always, in the dark.
Ille dille death, Lille. “There is so much death.” The memory of Ulla from two years ago, 2004. “I am Ylla of death.” Ulla Bäckström catching snowflakes on her tongue on a field.
The house in the darker part, November 2006. If you follow the longest path into the Boundary Woods, which starts behind what was once Tobias’s greenhouse next to the road, and you continue across all of the First Cape to where the sea meets you on the other side, you will come to the house in the darker part. Though, it should be mentioned: in those outskirts you do not exactly think sea when you see the water, it is such an inland-located overgrown muddy bay—the poles of an old jetty sticking up out of the water.
But in any case there is a house next to that beach, the only house in all of the Boundary Woods, an old alpine villa in the mud. Has been standing empty for many years, a great staircase takes up almost the entirety of the front of the house leading up to the entrance on the second floor. Many wide steps in gray concrete, cracked in places; during the summer moss and weeds grow tall from within the cracks. One large staircase in the middle of nowhere: can look like that from a distance during the fall and winter when all the leaves have fallen from the trees and all the undergrowth has withered away. Isolation and such loneliness around the abandoned house where a special darkness rules, even during the day. Almost timeless, without a season—or as if it were the same season all year round. Late fall, just before the snow.
A feeling that endures after the Winter Garden comes to the Second Cape, which is located just a few miles away and illuminates all of its surroundings with its powerful lighting systems. But the light does not quite reach the house in the darker part: just streams down carefully among the tall conifers or grows stiff, into aurora borealis–like streaks across the sky during the cold, clear winter evenings.
But the house, someone lived there once. A small family, mother, father, child who came to the District straight from the international jet-setter’s lifestyle which, during the winter, took place at various Central European ski resorts. But the dad, he was called the Islander, loved his wife more than anything else on earth and in secret had the house in the darker part built based on the model of a lodge that the mother had fallen in love with during a sunny winter walk high up in the Alps and he gave it to her as a surprise.
It was supposed to be their new home, here, in the District, they would plant roots and live as a family here for real in the darker part of the woods. Of course it was not very successful. Wrong place, wrong foundation for a house, and the architecture and the construction were not really to anyone’s credit either so the mother could not put up with the marshiness; rather she left and remarried and the father and daughter were left alone in the strange house. Then they lived there just the two of them, father and daughter, until the daughter grew up and became the Marsh Queen and went out into the world, to the punk music, to become a footnote.
But in the house, large wild parties were held there once. They could last for days because the Islander loved glitz and glamour. Even after his daughter had grown up and left home and he was living somewhere else, he would come back during the hunting season and then there were parties, for days and nights. Until it gradually ebbed out on its own: one party was the last party and the Islander stopped coming altogether. It was like this: you could stand in the forest, in the darkness, and watch the parties from the sidelines. Like a ship, an island of light—which was traveling by. Then suddenly the house was evacuated and it was empty and dark all over again.
Johanna goes to the house sometimes—there is a panorama window on the ground floor at the back through which you can see the basement. She cups her hands around her face, looks in: an old earth-filled swimming pool, filled with disgusting water that seeps up from the ground through the cracks in the tiling. Trash floats on the calm surface. Paper, scraps of fabric, bottles, the like.
But it was here, exactly right here in the pool, that she, the Marsh Queen, had grown up. The Marsh Queen whom she later became, when she went out into the world, to the punk music. The Marsh Queen who rose from the mire. Lived alone in the house with her father the Islander, her name was Sandra Wärn: a little girl who collected matchboxes and silk fabric—her mother had owned a silk fabric store that had gone bankrupt and all of the unsold fabric was brought to the house in the darker part and when her mother left, everything was left behind. Bundles, packages from a closet on the upper floor were unwound in shimmering, colorful lengths and spread out over the entire house. Down in the swimming pool too, when the Marsh Queen was a child, was just a square, sloppily tiled hole in the ground, never filled with water—there was so much about that house that in some way was unfinished. The girl hung out down there in the swimming pool, it became her world. And a moment in her life, childhood, the only world, for a time she came to share with a friend who became everything to her, they were always there. But that friendship ended abruptly and tragically, they had a falling out, the friend went and shot herself. And then in some way, Sandra Wärn had lost everything, there was nothing left.