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.
Iâve saved that first class photo, and itâs 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 donât 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 didnât exist. Perhaps Mum and Dadâs 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 didnât care. Life had actually got much easier since weâd 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 Iâd 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 didnât 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 wasnâtlike that. He was wearing the same tracksuit as at home, with a T-shirt underneath, sockless in a pair of brown sandals.
Children werenât actually allowed up in the wing, but they made an exception for us. Dad showed us his cell, which had real bars behind the window pane, and there was a bed and a table which were fastened to the floor. Robert was absolutely thrilled, as if he were in the midst of the plot of an exciting movie.
I donât know how the kids at school got wind that Dad was inside. Maybe it was the teacher who told them, or maybe the rumour just spread spontaneously. At any rate, everything changed. The others in the class started to call me names, they hid my clothes, put dog shit in my wellies and were generally nasty. And yet my brotherâs fate was many times worse. The kids in his class didnât even care about shunning him; they went after him physically right from the start. I dedicated the majority of my upper primary years to attempting to protect him, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldnât always be there. His problems just kept growing, with difficulties paying attention and truanting: he might vanish from school at any
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.
Iâve saved that first class photo, and itâs 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 donât 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 didnât exist. Perhaps Mum and Dadâs 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 didnât care. Life had actually got much easier since weâd 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 Iâd 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 didnât 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 wasnâtlike that. He was wearing the same tracksuit as at home, with a T-shirt underneath, sockless in a pair of brown sandals.
Children werenât actually allowed up in the wing, but they made an exception for us. Dad showed us his cell, which had real bars behind the window pane, and there was a bed and a table which were fastened to the floor. Robert was absolutely thrilled, as if he were in the midst of the plot of an exciting movie.
I donât know how the kids at school got wind that Dad was inside. Maybe it was the teacher who told them, or maybe the rumour just spread spontaneously. At any rate, everything changed. The others in the class started to call me names, they hid my clothes, put dog shit in my wellies and were generally nasty. And yet my brotherâs fate was many times worse. The kids in his class didnât even care about shunning him; they went after him physically right from the start. I dedicated the majority of my upper primary years to attempting to protect him, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldnât always be there. His problems just kept growing, with difficulties paying attention and truanting: he might vanish from school at any
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