Anders Roslund - The Beast

He got up suddenly and flapped about, looking for the remote control among the cards and newspapers on the table.

‘Where’s the fucker?’

‘Are you playing fucking cards or what?’

‘Shut it. Where’s the thing? The remote. Go get it, Hilding. Dump the cards. Gotta find it!’

Hilding Oldéus quickly put his cards down and started pulling nervously at the same newspapers that Dickybird had just been over. Thin and short, with a high-pitched, edgy voice, ten trips in eleven years. When he was on heroin, he had started scratching an itch near his right nostril and somehow couldn’t stop. Now it was a chronically infected sore.

The remote wasn’t on the table. Hilding ran around, searching at random on tables and windowsills. Dickybird pushed the coffee table out of the way, stepped forward between the irritated but silent card-players and turned the volume up.

‘Quiet, girls! Hitler is on now.’

In the TV corner, in the kitchen, in the corridor, everywhere, people stopped doing whatever it was. Hurrying to the TV, they lined up behind Dickybird. The midday news programme. Somebody whistled appreciatively when the next item was announced.

‘You heard. Shut up.’

Lennart Oscarsson. Someone held out a microphone. Behind him, Aspsås prison.

Oscarsson looked stressed. He was unused to TV cameras, unused to having to explain why something he was responsible for had been utterly buggered up.

…how was Lund able to escape…

…as I was trying to say…

…this prison is allegedly secure but…

…it didn’t happen here…

…what do you mean, ‘not here’…

…a hospital visit, to the Southern General, under guard…

…under guard…

…two of our most experienced warders… only two…

…two of our most experienced warders and a waist restraint…

…on whose recommendation… …he beat them both down and… who considered two guards enough… and escaped in the prison transport van… Oscarsson’s face was shown in close-up. He was sweating, his moist, nervous face held on screen for a long time, the camera enjoying his nakedness, picking out the drops of sweat on his forehead.

Television is all surface and immediacy. Oscarsson had been on leadership training courses and been filmed in media practice sessions, but this was for real. He was gripped by a deep-seated, churning anxiety; he was very tense and kept swallowing, his eyes had an uncertain, shifty look. He took too long to think up answers, stumbled over his words too often and forgot to come out with his prepared statements, despite knowing that you must have something definite to say and keep repeating it, regardless of what you’re asked. The situation was so in-your-face, fear had flooded his mind and drowned the lessons he had learned; what with the camera and the microphone and the insistent reporter, he was exposed with his trousers down to every backwoods citizen watching the news. He tried to produce sensible answers, but his mind was taken up by images of Nils, or of Karin, watching him on screen. Would he embarrass them? Did they understand what it was like? He longed to feel close to one of them, longed to feel hands touching his face, his neck, stroking his chest, his hips.

‘What a fucking loser!’

Dickybird had issued a command. Hilding heard it and cut the silence in the room.

‘Hitler’s coming across like a fucking retard.’

Dickybird moved and landed his fist hard on the back of Hilding’s head.

‘Shut the fuck up! Got that? I’m listening!’

Hilding twisted nervously in his chair, picked at the sore on his nose and said nothing.

He had learned his lesson the first time inside, only seventeen years old and on an eight-month stretch for robbery; he had done a central Seven-Eleven shop, as high as a kite but would need to buy more horse soon, he knew, and was close to panic. He threatened the shop assistant, a young woman, with a kitchen knife and robbed the till, didn’t get much, just two 500-kronor notes. Still, it was enough for a deal with the trader round the corner; he was negotiating when the police arrived on the scene. Back then prison had seemed strange and very frightening. He quickly tired of looking out for himself and adjusted to the fact that there would always be at least one man who ran the show and protected a faithful arselicker. He had been brown-nosing Dickybird in other prisons, once in ’98 and then again in ’99, and he was no worse than the other unit bosses.

The TV image switched to a different setting. Oscarsson’s pained face was still there, but further away, with the Aspsås wall in the background. The camera panned slowly from the top of the wall to the sky and back again, a visual cliché in the quickly produced news item. A voiceover, factual to the point of dreariness, reiterated some points. Bernt Lund had been given permission to visit hospital and had escaped from a secure transport that morning; he had been found guilty of several brutal rapes of underage girls, a series that had culminated in the so-called basement murders, when his victims had been two nine-year-olds; he had served four years of his sentence in solitary confinement at Kumla, but had recently been moved to one of the special units for sexual offenders at Aspsås, and since he was classified as very dangerous, it was in the public interest to show a picture of him.

A black-and-white still came on screen; it showed Bernt Lund dressed in a white shirt and dark pants, and smiling at the camera.

Dickybird stepped closer to the set.

‘See that bastard from hell? That’s the beast I kicked the shit out of in the gym yesterday. That fucking arsehole!’

Dickybird was screaming and those standing closest to him jumped and moved away a bit. They had been around at other times when he had freaked out about the nonces.

‘What are the bastards fucking well coming here for? Why here?’

As he screamed, he shoved the memories into the back of his mind. He did that every time. Home in the Svedmyra house, that sodding awful image of his uncle at his dad’s funeral. He was five. Per’s hand suddenly stroking his back and then slipping down to his bum.

‘I’ll cut their cocks off!’

Memories, crowding his head, he was forced to think about them, see them in his mind’s eye, relive them. Per said they should pop into Dad’s workshop, put his hand on top of the little boy’s best trousers, right in front, then pulled the trousers down, and the underpants. And pulled down his own trousers. Held him close, pushed at his bum with his knob.

‘Hilding, it’s got to be done. Cut it all off. Balls, the lot!’

He cleared his throat thoroughly and collected plenty of juice, spat it at Bernt Lund’s smiling black-and-white face on the TV screen, then stared at the splattered face, watching as the saliva trickled down across that cold smile behind the glass screen and dripped on to the floor.

The group scattered. Some retreated to their cells, some ambled off down the corridor, some stayed and picked up the cards again. Dickybird sat back in his old chair, but shook his head when Hilding gave him his hand of cards. The images in his head were refusing to go; somehow they resisted, however hard he tried to concentrate, calling out and slapping his thighs hard. Still an out-of-control mechanism projected one image after another. Per in their small holiday house in Blekinge; his big hands had been doing the same things, the boy was bleeding heavily and he hid his underpants so Mum wouldn’t see them. She never looked in the old cupboard in the shed.

‘Shit, Dickybird, come on, let’s play.’

‘Forget it. Not me. You carry on.’

‘Bugger Hitler. Come on, let’s start.’

‘Bugger yourself. Leave me alone or you’ll get it where it hurts. Again.’