turns the monster, chasing the boy through the garden, crying: ‘Now I’m going to cut your feet off, now I’m going to cut your feet off’, and the boy runs down to the edge of the forest, feels like running until the lawnmower can no longer be heard.
But inside, in the kitchen with Mummy and Grandma, his eyes work and he realises it’s best to eat buns when they’re fresh, before the mould creeping up from the floor has a chance to make them taste spoiled.
Daddy comes home to the cottage after work.
With bags that clink. And then Mummy wants to sit still. She feels better after Daddy comes with the bags, Grandma too, and they are happy, but not properly happy.
The sun disappears and the heat in the black-painted copper is exchanged for a metallic smell in the chilly stairwell and multicoloured glass marbles rolling in the sand of a sandpit, and then down into a hole, and someone’s in the way, another boy.
Go away. You’re not supposed to be there. And Jerry’s hand flies up, strikes where he means it to, across the nose, and then the blood comes and the boy screams, the boy he’s hit screams out loud and he himself screams: ‘Plaster!’, not: ‘He hit me first.’ He regards himself as too good for a lie like that.
In the world of direct experience there is a dead cat in a rubbish bin by the swings in the park. He once gave that cat some cream.
There are feelings floating in the two rooms of the flat, there are questions directed at him. ‘Do you know that we live in Berga?’ ‘That Daddy works for Saab, putting together planes that can fly through the air faster than words?’ And he recognises the laughter, it lacks warmth, and they sit on the orange and brown patterned sofa, the one they make into his bed each night, and they pour out drinks from the bottles they always have in a bag. Then they talk louder, the air turns sweet and unpleasant, and they look at black-and-white people on a screen, and Mummy can get up in a way that she can’t otherwise, she can fly up from the sofa and they dance, she only does that when they’ve been drinking and he likes watching Mummy dance. But then Daddy starts chasing him, he’s the lawnmower trying to catch him and hit him on his arms and legs, and the boy is four years old, and creeps out of an unlocked front door, into the world outside that is full of life waiting to be conquered; a cat to be buried, a swing to be swung up to the sky, car and trains to be driven, people shouldn’t lie in vomit and pain, shouldn’t chase him anywhere.
So he screams.
He breaks things.
He draws on the walls with crayons.
He gets hold of matches and sets fire to the world, watches his wooden boat burn in the sand, and feelings that he doesn’t know the name of, feelings that might not even have any names, drift through the flames, and the smouldering hull rests on a desolate patch of sand enclosed by a wooden frame.
Daddy’s despair. How the boy’s little body flies into the radiator beneath the living-room window when drunk Daddy stumbles over him. Mummy’s tired blinking eyes.
Pain, which as yet is always new.
Nothing is fixed.
Nothing has set into its final form.
Perhaps that is why nothing is possible.
The boy lies in his bed at night. He is awake. In the August evening there is a hint of the first chill of autumn.
He already knows there is another world, but he doesn’t think about it, he is busy living in the world of directly experienced reality.
There is no reflection as he daydreams in the darkness about killing his father. Killing him with rays that shoot from his blue pebble-eyes. He will make the lawnmower shut up.
Its blades will no longer snap at his heels.
10
The eye, as black as the water, seems to wink at Malin Fors as the head bobs in the gentle, scarcely perceptible waves.
The yellow raincoat is almost luminous in the water.
The throbbing in her own skull.
The dog barking over in the car by the edge of the forest. The sound like
But inside, in the kitchen with Mummy and Grandma, his eyes work and he realises it’s best to eat buns when they’re fresh, before the mould creeping up from the floor has a chance to make them taste spoiled.
Daddy comes home to the cottage after work.
With bags that clink. And then Mummy wants to sit still. She feels better after Daddy comes with the bags, Grandma too, and they are happy, but not properly happy.
The sun disappears and the heat in the black-painted copper is exchanged for a metallic smell in the chilly stairwell and multicoloured glass marbles rolling in the sand of a sandpit, and then down into a hole, and someone’s in the way, another boy.
Go away. You’re not supposed to be there. And Jerry’s hand flies up, strikes where he means it to, across the nose, and then the blood comes and the boy screams, the boy he’s hit screams out loud and he himself screams: ‘Plaster!’, not: ‘He hit me first.’ He regards himself as too good for a lie like that.
In the world of direct experience there is a dead cat in a rubbish bin by the swings in the park. He once gave that cat some cream.
There are feelings floating in the two rooms of the flat, there are questions directed at him. ‘Do you know that we live in Berga?’ ‘That Daddy works for Saab, putting together planes that can fly through the air faster than words?’ And he recognises the laughter, it lacks warmth, and they sit on the orange and brown patterned sofa, the one they make into his bed each night, and they pour out drinks from the bottles they always have in a bag. Then they talk louder, the air turns sweet and unpleasant, and they look at black-and-white people on a screen, and Mummy can get up in a way that she can’t otherwise, she can fly up from the sofa and they dance, she only does that when they’ve been drinking and he likes watching Mummy dance. But then Daddy starts chasing him, he’s the lawnmower trying to catch him and hit him on his arms and legs, and the boy is four years old, and creeps out of an unlocked front door, into the world outside that is full of life waiting to be conquered; a cat to be buried, a swing to be swung up to the sky, car and trains to be driven, people shouldn’t lie in vomit and pain, shouldn’t chase him anywhere.
So he screams.
He breaks things.
He draws on the walls with crayons.
He gets hold of matches and sets fire to the world, watches his wooden boat burn in the sand, and feelings that he doesn’t know the name of, feelings that might not even have any names, drift through the flames, and the smouldering hull rests on a desolate patch of sand enclosed by a wooden frame.
Daddy’s despair. How the boy’s little body flies into the radiator beneath the living-room window when drunk Daddy stumbles over him. Mummy’s tired blinking eyes.
Pain, which as yet is always new.
Nothing is fixed.
Nothing has set into its final form.
Perhaps that is why nothing is possible.
The boy lies in his bed at night. He is awake. In the August evening there is a hint of the first chill of autumn.
He already knows there is another world, but he doesn’t think about it, he is busy living in the world of directly experienced reality.
There is no reflection as he daydreams in the darkness about killing his father. Killing him with rays that shoot from his blue pebble-eyes. He will make the lawnmower shut up.
Its blades will no longer snap at his heels.
10
The eye, as black as the water, seems to wink at Malin Fors as the head bobs in the gentle, scarcely perceptible waves.
The yellow raincoat is almost luminous in the water.
The throbbing in her own skull.
The dog barking over in the car by the edge of the forest. The sound like
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