And well, later, the whole time, she was, so to speak, in the newsstand and the moss was growing over her head, living with Susette Packlén’s mother for a while as a boarder while Susette was away and her mother was, during the final years, not really right either. “Rug rags, Manager, she collected them. Crehp crehp. Had to be cut, cut—
“But we had fun together, I really liked her.” And the mother died and Susette came back and the house was sold and suddenly Maj-Gun became a boarder with another family in another house there in the same neighborhood below the square in the town center. A normal family, Gunilla, Göran, a pair of teachers; moreover the Manager’s colleagues at the school. “But shhh, Manager, they aren’t, no one is allowed to know about this relationship… I respect the Count, the charm of the office manager and maintaining the façade in your capacity as the District’s mainstay.” Maj-Gun stammers, suddenly in the middle of the story about something other than the intense indignation that pours into her, an appallingly bad mood.
“Maj-Gun”—the Manager takes her hand in his—”it isn’t like that.”
“With, then, Manager,” Maj-Gun continues with the Manager’s hand in hers, it feels better, “a thousand cranky kids on the ground floor,” and there at the new boarding place she fattened up for real. Not because she had eaten that much; “it wasn’t a feel-good problem, Manager,” or a hormone imbalance or Femininity, which was exploding, uncontrolled inside her, swelling over every orifice and border, but a condition that was given form: “I am without space.
“This isn’t very coherent, Manager.” Maj-Gun suddenly interrupts herself, but in a new way. Because in the midst of everything she realizes maybe it is the Manager’s hand in hers, a body of water reveals itself in the woods, the fog disperses entirely, right here, in the open, New Year’s night: the possibility. That she might be able to. Can. Tell, everything. Both everything that is clear and everything else, less clear, more incomprehensible. Images, scenes, that she does not know what she is going to do with. About Susette Packlén. The revolver in Susette’s bathroom. And the cat, which all of a sudden was not there. “It got run over.”
And also. That which in some way belongs to what is obvious, though it was a fantasy fetus, but not any less because of it, it was real too. She has to beat it into her head: not the Boy in the woods, but Bengt. Maybe she would be able to say something about that too. In some way. That she had never known him. It had been her story, a story that has gone on and on in her head. And that received a continuation in reality, at the newsstand, with Susette Packlén on the other side of the counter. And flowed out, unchecked, ran away—like “The Manuscript of a Life,” a novel she had been sitting and writing in her rented room. “Promising! Short! Kill your darlings and tone down the self-pity.” Sometimes she opened the leather-bound folder where she kept the comments from the book editor on a first draft she had sent to the publisher a long time ago. As the years passed, she had opened the binder more often, and those comments and how they sounded had grown inside her head too. Had, in and of itself, almost become a monument and that is where the talk had come in, about Literature and all of the interferences that should be done to it, regardless of whether or not the Critics would have any understanding for it; a topic of conversation she had introduced in long monologues she held in the kitchen, with her landlady Gunilla as a willing, respectful listener because more was happening here in the house now than “1,001 Castles to Furnish Before You Die,” recurring purchases of new curtains for the kitchen that never turned out right regardless of how you tried. In other words Art was happening here in the house. And no, it was not as though she had stopped writing, not even in secret. No, she sat in her room and wrote and wrote, it surged and surged, the more Gunilla and Göran, her landlords, moved around on tippytoe in the house, shooed away the children who wanted to play with the renter, “Come out now Terrible Animal Child and chase us!” But “Shhh, kids, get away from here,” could be heard from the other side because the Writer should not be disturbed during the “working&editingphase” of the “great manuscript”—that word “great” had also come about with time—Maj-Gun herself when she was not in her room had, with importance in her voice, led the landlords to believe that was what was occupying her behind the door in the boarder’s room, which always needed to be kept shut so “the creation process” could proceed.
So yes, she wrote, but the more she wrote, that was strange, the more she took notes and took notes in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” “collected material,” the farther away she got… yes, that was strange.
But something had existed for real, in earnest, a place where everything had started. Something terrible and great that pulled, had pulled her toward it. Rug rags. The Animal Child’s peering eyes in the kitchen of a single-family home, among rags. A woman who was cutting, cutting, Maj-Gun who was cutting, but it was no image, it was for real, not one of those similes, metaphors.
Rug rags. Which need words.
Silk velvet rag scraps I have seen the most I have… Yes, “raw, unworked,” which the book editor had also written in his comments. But stilclass="underline" honest.
The writing that had carried her there, from one room to another room, an empty room despite the fact that there was a lot of paper there, a lot of dreams, stories, tales, feelings, jealousy—but her, personally, somewhere else, I am without space.
Talk about it, in some way. And about Susette. Rug rags, Susette. What was it about Susette?
“Sometimes that you are two who are one. I sought that in her as well.”
Susette in the hangout. Her eyes. Maj-Gun who was hitting, and blood.
At the same time. She had wanted to kill her. She wanted to kill her.
And Bengt. The Winter Garden. “What are you babbling about?”
And another image. Which was not an image. A scene that was hanging, pulled loose, but was still true.
Him lying in the house, the room, and blood—
Talk about Bengt. The Love that was no love. But he died, despite everything, anyway.
All of this that could be explained—is not, after all.
Because PRRRR. There, in the middle of the night, the phone rings.
The Manager jumps up from the sofa bed, runs out into the hall, closes the door, and when he has finished talking he comes back.
“I’m afraid, my dear girl, that it’s bad news,” he says carefully. “That was your father. Your aunt, Elizabeth. In Portugal. She’s dead. He asked me to give you the news.