Anders Roslund - The Beast

‘There is no key because there’s no lock. I never bothered.

Somehow it was Dad’s things and had nothing to do with me.’

‘Good. Thanks.’

He wanted the call to end there, now that he knew all he needed to know.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘He had some things of Marie’s. Things she made at school and gave him. I want to take care of them.’

‘Why?’

‘I just do. Must I argue the case for everything?’

He was thirsty and drank most of a second carton of juice. Then he wrote a note, just a few lines to explain he’d be away for a while but would come back home as soon as he could. He stuck it on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a ladybird.

It was still raining, but less hard.

He walked across the street to the block of flats opposite and took the lift to the attic floor.

He got up from the seat.

It was hard, made from thick wooden planks covered in graffiti. He had been sitting there all morning, for four hours by now, and he felt uncomfortable, stiff all over.

He had watched the little sluts come and go, knew how they moved, what they looked like when they chatted. Good-looking whores, like that other one; they didn’t have any tits to speak about, but long, slender legs and knowing eyes that had seen cock before.

He liked the two blondes best. Always happy, they were. He knew their names, they spoke so loudly, and he had a few photos. He had looked so long at their images that he felt he knew the girls well.

They were quite grown up, in a way.

Both were the kind of whore who knows what she wants. When their parents brought them to school, they hardly waved goodbye. He had often thought of little bitches like that, who felt they were in charge, thought of what he would say to them and what he would do to them.

He felt lonely now. Having watched and waited for so long, it was time they got together, the three of them. The parents would be late, their sort always were.

He checked the time. Five past eleven. Almost six hours to go.

In the afternoon. Like with the other one.

Whores like to be outside in the afternoon. It had been too hot earlier, but now after the rain they would be out in the grounds for a long time, that’s what they liked to do. It would be crowded, what with all the kids around, and the local fuzz wouldn’t notice a thing. He knew just what he would do.

It was dark. Fredrik had been in the attic only once before, when he and Agnes had come here to store what little was worth keeping from Birger’s flat. Agnes’ father had simply stopped living, between one breath and the next, apparently having made an instant change-over from being alive to being dead. They had found him naked in bed, propped up to read a magazine, Boating News, which he was still holding; the reading lamp was lit and on the bedside table his diary lay open at the day’s date, with a completed note about the midday temperature and extent of rainfall, as well as recording his trip to the corner grocer’s to hand in his pools coupon at the tobacco counter and then get something for his supper. Below this entry he had added a few lines about feeling oddly tired and the beginnings of a headache, for no reason he could think of, and that he had taken a couple of aspirin.

Fredrik had never got to know him. Birger had been hard to reach, a big, burly, aggressive man, who was so completely unlike his daughter in every way that it was just about impossible to believe them to be related at all.

He went into the storage pen that belonged to Birger’s old flat. Vaguely familiar things were stacked against the walls, boxes of clothes, a standard lamp, two armchairs, four fishing rods, a bicycle trailer. Getting ready to squeeze between the chairs, he heard the attic door open and held still in mid-movement.

He listened and waited in the murky light. At least two of them; they were whispering.

Then a high young voice, a boy’s.

‘Hello-oo!’

Silence, then more whispering.

‘Hello there, we’re all coming in! Lots of us.’

He recognised the voice, smiled, and was just about to call out when the other one, so far silent, spoke up, sounding a little older and tougher.

‘See? It works every time, I know that.’

Two boys, who slowly found their way down the central aisle, on the look-out. He could hear their tense breathing, and spotted them when they were just a few pens away. He didn’t want to scare them.

‘Hi, David!’

Too late. The sudden voice had obviously alarmed them.

‘Look over here, it’s me. Fredrik.’

Now they were looking the right way and made him out where he stood among the boxes and chairs.

The dark-haired, shorter one was David, but his mate was a new face, red hair and freckled skin. He was taller, more strongly built than David. The boys looked at each other with the disappointment ghost-busters feel when the awful spectral being they have been chasing turns out to be somebody’s dad in the wrong place.

David pointed at Fredrik.

‘Hey, that’s just Marie’s dad.’

David had been Marie’s best friend, they had been there for each other since way back, since their first efforts to walk. They had gone off to the same playground and the same nursery school, had supper and stayed the night in each other’s homes, woken together in the morning before everybody else, making up for the brothers and sisters neither had.

David fell silent again immediately. He felt very bad about saying Marie’s name like that, because it must upset Fredrik now that Marie had become dead and would never come back, or so he had been told. He turned away, pulling at his mate’s arm to make him come along.

‘Don’t go. You stay, boys.’

David looked back. He was crying now.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I forgot.’

While Fredrik manoeuvred himself to get out from the store, he wondered how young children might construe death. Could they grasp that the dead were not with them and never would be, that dead people don’t breathe, or see, or hear or come out to play ever again? He didn’t think they could, and neither could he, not really.

‘David, come here. You too. What’s your name?’

‘Lukas.’

‘OK. You too, Lukas.’

Fredrik sat down on the dusty floor of reddish-brown pitted bricks, pointing to show that he wanted the boys to come and sit next to him, one on either side.

‘Sit here, and I’ll tell you something.’

They did as he asked. He put his arms round their shoulders.

‘David.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember what we played in our house the last time you came?’

‘You were the Big Bad Wolf,’ David said and smiled. ‘We were the Little Pigs. We won. We always won!’

‘Sure, you won, as usual. Was it fun, do you think?’

‘Yes it was! It was great fun. Marie is good at playing.’

She was standing in front of him. She was smiling, insisting that they must play now, just one more time. He sighed, the way he always did; she laughed and they played again.

‘She was good at playing. Great fun to play with. And she laughed a lot. You know all that, don’t you, David?’

‘Oh yes. I know that.’

‘Good. So it’s important to know too that you mustn’t ever feel worried about saying Marie’s name. It’s fine, with me and with everybody.’

David looked fixedly at the brick floor for a while. He was trying to understand. Then he spoke, first to Lukas, then to Fredrik.

‘Marie is fun to play with and I’m friends with her. But she has become dead.’