Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

“Like you at the rug rag bucket when we were young, in the house. You were in shock after your mother’s death and you had such a terrible stomachache and of course I talked about my love then too but I couldn’t just tell you everything because you were so unwell. What it was really like. With him and the American girl.

“Well, anyway. What I want to say is that there is a suffering which, even if you see and hear it, regardless of how obvious it is, you don’t bother with it, not out of meanness but because you’re so preoccupied with your own things. So. For example me. I should have been more aware because that girl went and shot herself. Pang . A bullet through the head. Also at Bule Marsh. The same place where the American girl drowned.”

“What are you talking about? What girl?”

“Doris. That was her name. A year or so older, the folk band girl. The soloist in that band, Micke’s Folk Band… Micke Friberg whom all the girls had a crush on because he was good-looking and musical and so deep , something big was going to become of him, do you remember? Oh, well, Susette. I don’t either. The two of us are just as forgetful. There are lots of golden boys with prospects and there isn’t room for all of them on Olympus or whatever it’s called later in life. Well. Anyway. Doris Flinkenberg was his girlfriend for a few weeks that fall and Micke Friberg was in love with her and she also tried to love him but it didn’t work out because she was in love with someone else.

“We, Doris Flinkenberg and I, in other words, had raked the cemetery together the summer before. Of course, she was the one doing the raking because it was her summer job but I had summer vacation, long, free vacation days at the cemetery, my hangout in the world at that time. And as I said, it would turn out, her last summer but you couldn’t know that then, not even later in the fall when she came back to the cemetery once and I met her there a few days before she took her own life.

“Maybe it was like this. That she knew something about all of that with the American girl that made it so she no longer wanted to live. Something really awful. But I thought about that later when it was too late so to speak. Maybe we should have brought everything out in the open while there was still time, so it wouldn’t have been just a few sentences she had spoken in passing. Just think if I had been able to help her. I saw that she was depressed, of course: the fear, the anxiety that stank around her. Still, oh hell, I didn’t understand—not then.

“And I was so angry at her too. Thought she was proud. During the summer, at the cemetery, she just walked around and talked about everything she was going to do later when her summer job was finished. Travel to Austria with her best friend and all of the fun things they would do there. Rather dismal for an outsider to listen to in the long run. But in and of itself, it’s understandable in hindsight too: you know, how you can pin all your hopes on a trip like that to anywhere, just escape, when you don’t see any other way out. Because there wouldn’t be any trip later, with her friend. It was probably just daydreams and bragging.

“In other words, we didn’t really get along. And in some way, I had certain expectations of her. Her and her friend: I had seen them wearing the same shirts with the writing LONELINESS&FEAR on the front and thought that maybe there was something a bit different there, something with spice for real, in some way. And yes, it can be said in passing even though it isn’t important in this context: it was of course her friend, Sandra Wärn from the house in the darker part of the woods, whom she was really in love with but the two of them ended up fighting in the end and it broke Doris’s heart; Micke Friberg whom she was together with later, regardless of how he tried to make her forget, oh no, Susette, Doris didn’t forget.

“Because later, in the fall, at the cemetery, in other words she came there again once the way some people come to the cemetery in a fateful mood, was so upset, beside herself, you could see it. But then I was angry at her, as it were, because during the summer she had gone to the caretaker at the church and complained about me. Said she couldn’t do her summer job properly because I was following her all the time and babbling and babbling about myself. So she had arranged a gag order with the summer workers and papa Pastor he was mad because the bit about the Liz Maalamaa mask that I had started using again had reached his ears. Just for fun, of course.

You remember the mask, which Tom Maalamaa and I used to run around with at the cemetery when we were little, you were there of course, you and your mother, with the flowers by the graves. Papa Pastor had to deal with a lot of complaints, not from you and your mother, of course, but from others who had business at the cemetery and he forbade us to take the mask with us there. He detested that mask because we called it the Liz Maalamaa mask after our godmother and aunt who was also his own sister of course—”

“Maj-Gun, wait a second,” Susette interrupts her then. “Were you wearing that mask when you saw Doris at the cemetery?”

“Yes. At some point. Why?”

“But—isn’t it… I mean… you weren’t a child anymore you know?”

“Nah, Susette, that’s true. At the very beginning, in the summer, for the most part I definitely wanted to make myself interesting too, in some way, show that I could have some interesting stories too. Later, in the fall, I guess I just wanted to scare people. WANTED it to have an effect on her. Well. It did.

“She got scared. Quite simply damned disproportionately shitscared. But, Susette, it was never my intention to scare her for real. Here is the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa .

“But, Susette—” Maj-Gun gets ready again out of her contemplativeness and says with emphasis, “Actually. I didn’t care about her .

“All the time from the beginning. NOW I’m going to tell you what it was like: that the reason I got close to her at all during the summer was her story. That is to say, what she had been through. Everyone in the District knew about it, it had been in the local papers. That it was her, Doris Flinkenberg from the cousin’s house, who had found the corpse of the American girl. FIVE years after she drowned at Bule Marsh.

“She had died back in 1969 but her body didn’t surface until five years later. It’s true, no fraud about it there, no sir. But a strange body of water there in the woods, currents, deep and ice-cold. Like a refrigerator. She must have gotten stuck at the bottom in some way, everyone knew the whole time of course that she was there somewhere in the mire, the deep. And she had a red raincoat on; that is what Doris Flinkenberg saw. A red spot somewhere in the reeds… and yes, in and of itself, not much left of her then, of course.

“The corpse itself I mean. But the plastic was whole, plastic doesn’t decompose. Think, Susette,” Maj-Gun suddenly exclaims, “all the plastic that’s still going to be here when we’re gone—

“So, Susette. That was what I had in my head when I first tried to get to know Doris Flinkenberg that summer at the cemetery. And I had summer vacation, I had time to do a lot of thinking, so to speak.

“About a corpse in the marsh, for example, and what it would be like to find it. What something like that would feel like, as it were. That was what interested me. That experience, in general.

“But when I brought it up with her—well, yes—

“She really didn’t want to talk to me. She got scared. I understood it later, in other words. What she got scared about.

“And in the fall, a few months later. Scared shitless . She was shaking—