The Circle (Hammer)

38



WHEN MINOO WAS little, she always felt that December dragged on for ever in an endless wait for Christmas Eve, but now the days just fly by.

This term Minoo has had a growing sense that she’s falling behind at school. Not enough to affect her grades – but as if it may begin to. Now she’s trying to catch up. She’s been hard at her books and stays awake to cram with the help of coffee, sweets and Coca-Cola. She’s started taking her Thermos mug to school so that she can excel during the first few lessons, rather than falling asleep with her cheek on the desk’s smooth cool plastic surface.

They’re performing a Christmas show on the last day of school. Ida’s singing a solo – ‘Gläns över sjö och strand’ – and is doing it with such a schmaltzy, fake R&B wail that the audience ought to die of embarrassment, but she receives thunderous applause. She lights up like the sun while the biology teacher, Ove Post, dabs discreetly at the corner of his eye.

The principal makes a short speech about how the coming new year will allow everyone to move on. Everyone understands that she’s talking about Elias and Rebecka, that they should try to put what happened behind them. Automatically Minoo tries to catch Linnéa’s eye, but she’s not there. Minoo realises she hasn’t seen her since Lucia night. Maybe she hasn’t been at school at all.

Afterwards they gather in the classroom and Max hands out his reports. When he passes Minoo her envelope he flashes the same impersonal smile he always bestows on her now.

The secret glance of mutual understanding they used to exchange has gone. Had it ever even been there? Maybe she’d imagined it.

But he kissed me.

She thinks about it for the millionth time – it’s like a mantra she’s repeated so often it’s starting to lose its meaning. In dark moments she wonders if the evening at Max’s house was just a figment of her imagination, a psychosis brought on by the pressures of getting good grades, supernatural death threats and far too many dreams of losing her virginity to her teacher …

Minoo glances at Anna-Karin, who is sitting diagonally behind her and has just opened her envelope. ‘How’d it go?’ she can’t help asking.

Anna-Karin hesitates for a moment. Straight As. In every subject. Even PE.

How many did you deserve? Minoo wants to ask, but she bites her lip and smiles stiffly. ‘Congratulations,’ she says.

‘Thanks,’ Anna-Karin mumbles.

Her heart pounding, Minoo opens her own envelope, but everything is as it should be. Only her PE grade falls short of Anna-Karin’s.

Minoo is among the first to leave the classroom. She doesn’t even say ‘Merry Christmas’ to Max. She can’t handle another empty smile. When she steps out into the playground she sees her mother’s car parked by the gate and is struck by an intense longing for home. As soon as she gets there she’ll shut herself into her room, wrap Christmas presents and stuff herself with ginger biscuits …

Gustaf is at the gates. He’s standing stock still, staring straight at her.

Minoo looks for an escape route. Her mother beeps and Minoo waves. She has to pass Gustaf to get to the car.

He mustn’t know that you know. Act like nothing’s happened, she tells herself. He’s just Gustaf. Good old Gustaf Åhlander.

Who has made a pact with demons.

Minoo forces herself to walk normally, quickly, but not too quickly, yet her heart is racing as if she had just run a marathon.

Gustaf looks so ordinary in his black down jacket and white woollen hat. Somehow that makes her even more scared of him. This is the guy Rebecka had trusted more than anyone else in the whole world. The one who had thrown her off the school roof. This is exactly how he’d looked.

‘Hi,’ Gustaf says, and smiles as she walks past him. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘Merry Christmas,’ Minoo croaks. She has to muster all her self-discipline to stop herself running the rest of the way to the car.



They celebrate Christmas, just the three of them – mother, father and Minoo – and the holiday is characterised by the same safe routines as always. On Christmas Day they have a good long lie-in. They play a Trivial Pursuit from the 1990s, and as usual her father is annoyed by the badly formulated questions. Afterwards Minoo goes up to her room and looks at her presents. The one she is most pleased with is a lavish book of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Exactly the one she’d wanted.

She sits at the head of the bed, semi-recumbent against the colourful pillows, and rests the book on her knees. She flips past the images of pale, serious women and men in clothes from bygone times and lingers on a painting of Ophelia from Hamlet – a girl in a white dress lying on her back in a stream, about to drown. The image makes her angry. Ophelia is filled with bliss and there’s something almost erotic about the painting – as if it was somehow delightful or sexy that Hamlet’s girlfriend had drowned herself when everyone she’d trusted had let her down or died.

Minoo keeps flipping the pages, and when she comes to Rossetti’s painting of Persephone, she is mesmerised.

So this is how she looked. The girl Max loved. The one who had killed herself. Minoo knows that the human psyche is complicated, that there are no simple answers or solutions, but part of her cannot understand how someone loved by Max could be so unhappy.

She puts down the book and closes her eyes. Once again she revisits the events of that evening at Max’s house, but she lets them take another turn. Max doesn’t break off the kiss, but continues, lets his hand slip underneath her shirt and over her breasts …

But it’s hard to relax and lose herself in the fantasy. She feels watched, as if someone is peering into her mind and can see the adult film being screened there.

Minoo listens. Her mother is clattering in the kitchen. She’s in a bad mood again –you can hear it in the way she’s emptying the dishwasher. Her parents have had a fight about how they think the other is working too hard again. Her father has gone back to the newspaper to check the material that’ll be printed after the holiday.

Minoo gets up and goes into the bathroom. She looks at the old map of Engelsfors where Kärrgruvan has been blotted out since the night of the blood-red moon. She puts up her hair in a ponytail before bending over the sink and lathering her face. She rinses it with ice-cold water and examines herself in the mirror.

A black shadow moves silently through the air behind her and disappears through the bathroom door. It had had no form. It might have been a cloud of black smoke, or those spots you see when you’ve rubbed your eyes too hard.

She opens the door and looks out at the dark landing. Nothing. Just her imagination, she tells herself.



*



‘Merry Christmas, bitches!’ Vanessa shouts. She turns up the volume on the amp connected to the computer and climbs on to the table. Then she helps Evelina and Michelle up. They almost bump into each other as they dance. Vanessa steadies herself with the palm of her hand against the ceiling. Her top rises above her belly-button as she rocks to the music. Her heels dig into the soft, cheap pine of Jonte’s kitchen table.

She and Evelina are dancing close to each other and Michelle sinks to her haunches, shakes her butt and rises again. The boys watch with a horny glint in their eyes, but Vanessa ignores them. She looks at her friends, her two best friends in the world. An old song by Beyoncé and Jay-Z has started to play, and all three squeal with delight. They used to dance to it in Vanessa’s living room when they were little – at her house they could play music at full blast – and her mother had liked it so much that she used to come in and dance with them. Evelina and Michelle thought Vanessa’s mum was the coolest in the whole world, and back then so did Vanessa. Of course that was BN: Before Nicke.

The happy feeling dies a little when she thinks of her mother. This is the first Christmas they haven’t celebrated together.

‘Nessa!’ Evelina shouts over the music. ‘How are you feeling?’

Vanessa meets her drunken gaze. If anyone would understand it’s Evelina. Since her parents were divorced, her mother has dated every arsehole there is in Engelsfors. For a few months in year seven, Evelina had virtually lived at Vanessa’s house. That was when her mum’s latest flame had offered to help Evelina wash certain difficult-to-reach places in the shower, a level of degeneracy to which Nicke had never come close.

Yeah, Evelina would understand. Michelle too, for that matter. But who wants to talk about that shit?

‘F*cking awesome!’ Vanessa screams back, and flashes a blinding smile.

She’s going to forget all this crap and party like there’s no tomorrow. After all, there might not be. May as well take advantage of it. When Michelle hands her a can of beer, she chugalugs it and then hurls it across the room, hitting Lucky in the back.

Her engagement ring catches her eye.

Everything’s going to be fine, she thinks. Everything’s going to work out.

Wille breaks free from the throngs of partiers and stands below her. His eyelids are heavy and he’s got a silly smile on his face. Vanessa squats, wobbles unsteadily, takes his face in her hands and kisses him hard. He tastes of smoke and alcohol, and his tongue is warm and wet in her mouth. She sits on the edge of the table, wraps her legs around Wille’s waist and pulls him closer to her. Then she puts her arms around his neck. A slow song she has never heard before filters out of the speakers.

‘You’re so f*cking sexy,’ he whispers.

His warm breath against her ear radiates through her body. She sucks his lower lip and bites it. He laughs.

‘Watch it,’ he whispers, and lets his hands slide down to her butt.

‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ she says.

Wille doesn’t answer. He lifts her down from the table. They hug each other. The song builds, filling the room, as they hold each other. The music is like a bubble that encapsulates her and Wille, while everyone else fades into the background. The only thing in the world that means anything is right here right now, in the warmth of their bodies pressed together.

‘We should go away,’ Wille whispers, into her ear. ‘F*ck school. Let’s go to Thailand. You hardly need any money there. Just lie on the beach all day long. F*ck and smoke all night. Just you and me. That’s all we need.’

She’s never been to Thailand, but she can see it so clearly: white beaches, sparkling blue sea, Wille’s suntanned body, never having to feel cold again. To run away from everything, from her mother, from fear, from magic books and heavy responsibilities. Why not?

The song cuts out abruptly and changes back to hip-hop.

‘Come on,’ Vanessa whispers. She takes Wille’s hand and leads him to the stairs. When she glances over her shoulder she sees that Evelina and Michelle are still standing on the table. They’re boogieing drunkenly, but still managing to look sexy. Lucky is kissing a blue-haired girl, one of Linnéa’s friends. But Linnéa is nowhere to be seen.

‘I love you,’ Wille says, as they sink on to Jonte’s bed.

She rips off her sweaty top while he unbuttons her jeans, pulls them down over her thighs and calves, then struggles to get her feet out. He takes off his T-shirt and lies down next to her.

‘You mean it?’ Vanessa murmurs.

‘That I love you?’

‘That you’d like to go away with me. Just like that.’

‘Let’s leave tomorrow,’ Wille whispers, slurring a little. ‘We don’t even have to pack. We don’t need any clothes.’

He tries to wriggle out of his jeans and falls off the bed. Vanessa laughs and helps him up. She kisses him and lets her hand caress him outside his boxers. Wille groans and coaxes off her pants, kisses her breasts, stomach and continues downward.

Vanessa doesn’t care about what’s happened, doesn’t care about the future. Only Wille means anything to her, and how he can make her forget everything.



Afterwards, Wille goes to look for a beer. She pulls on her clothes and notices that her top smells of smoke. She heads into the bathroom for a pee and touches up her makeup. She finds a half-full bottle of wine under the sink and has a few swigs as she gets ready. She blows exaggerated kisses at the mirror, poses, flashes her breasts at herself and giggles. She’s nearly hammered.

When she opens the door, Linnéa is standing outside, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. She’s wearing a short black dress with a corset top, fishnet stockings and black boots. Her eyes are heavily made-up underneath her long black fringe. They gaze at each other.

‘You look a bit worn out,’ Linnéa says finally, with a smirk.

‘Kind of you to say so,’ Vanessa says, and grins back.

She’s unexpectedly happy to see Linnéa. Tonight seems like one long love trip. She wonders vaguely if someone put ecstasy in the wine she just drank.

‘Worn out, but hot,’ Linnéa adds.

‘You look hot, too,’ Vanessa says. ‘But not worn out.’

‘Only on the inside.’ Linnéa smiles.

Vanessa wonders if Linnéa’s drunk. She’s probably the sort of person who never really shows it.

‘Things got pretty … intense last time,’ Linnéa says, and Vanessa wonders if that’s her way of saying, ‘Sorry I acted like a bloodthirsty maniac.’

Linnéa laughs, showing off her perfect teeth.

Shit, she really is hot, Vanessa thinks.

‘But I meant it,’ Linnéa continues. ‘We can’t trust the principal. She really can’t protect us.’

Vanessa lays her hand on Linnéa’s arm and stares into her dark eyes. She’s feeling a bit dizzy. Crap, she shouldn’t have drunk that wine. But she can’t let Linnéa see how drunk she is because then Linnéa will never take her seriously, and what she’s going to say now is important. ‘Even if that’s true it doesn’t make any difference. We have to stick together. We promised each other.’

Linnéa’s arm is cool, and suddenly Vanessa is worried that her hand is sweaty. She removes it and almost loses her balance.

‘Speaking of which,’ Linnéa says, ‘we’re not the only ones here tonight.’

Vanessa doesn’t understand what she means.

‘There’s another witch in the house,’ Linnéa whispers theatrically. Then she adds, more seriously, ‘And we should probably go and see what she’s up to.’