The Circle (Hammer)

7



THE CART BOUNCES and lurches along the road. She’s on her knees and has managed to free herself from the sack they pulled over her head. The morning air cools her sweaty face. She glances at the driver’s hunched back and floppy black felt hat.

She straightens up a little and struggles with the ropes. They are tied too tightly.

A forest stretches along one side of the road, dark and silent, and on the other, a wide expanse of open fields. Little grey huts lie scattered here and there, huddled beneath the clear sky. In the east, the morning star glows above the pink streak of dawn.

She tries to muster the courage to jump from the cart. But how far would she get with her broken body and fettered feet? Would she even survive the fall? She wouldn’t be able to catch herself with her bound hands.

But what holds her back more than anything else is despair.

What sort of life would await her if she escaped into the forest?

Alone and cast out. Hunted by those she had thought she could trust. Forsaken by those who had promised always to protect her.

The red sun will clear the horizon at any moment.

They are nearly there.



Rebecka opens her eyes. The smell of smoke stings her nose, more pungent than it was yesterday morning.

The floor feels cold beneath her feet. She pulls on her socks from yesterday, a sports bra, an old T-shirt and baggy tracksuit trousers. Then she sneaks out of the room and quietly closes the door behind her.

She peeks into her little sisters’ room. Alma and Moa are still asleep. Rebecka can hear their breathing, and is filled with the love she often feels for them. It takes away the sadness and fear she experienced in her dream.

Only when she steps out into the hall does she realise that it is only six o’clock. She can hear her mother’s gentle snoring from behind the closed bedroom door, the humming and clicking of the refrigerator. Not a sound from her brothers’ room. Rebecka laces up her jogging shoes, grabs her grey hoody from the chair and leaves the apartment.

As she’s running down the stairs she can feel the endorphins pumping into her bloodstream. By the time she steps out on to the street, euphoria is bubbling inside her. It’s a beautiful day again today. The sun bathes the dull three-storey brick apartment blocks in a warm glow.

Rebecka pulls out her battered MP3 player from the pocket of her hoody and puts on the earphones. She jogs down the street and turns left at the end. She quickens her pace. The only time she loves her body is when she’s running, when she can feel the blood surging through it. It’s a machine that burns calories and oxygen.

She wishes she could see her body the way Gustaf claims to see it. But to her all reflective surfaces are like fairground mirrors. It started in year six when she and a few friends went on a diet together. The others gave up after just a few days, but Rebecka discovered she was good at it. Far too good. Since then not a day has gone by without her thinking about what she eats and how much she works out. Several times a day she calculates it in her head: small breakfast, small lunch, slightly bigger dinner in exchange for an extra long run – how many calories does that make?

The autumn of year nine was the worst. That was when she ate least and was best at hiding it. At weekends she would sometimes stuff herself with sweets and crisps, so that her mum and dad wouldn’t get suspicious. Then, to compensate, she ate even less the following week. It was during one of those weeks that she fainted in the gym, and the teacher sent her to the nurse where she made a partial confession that she might have been a bit ‘lax’ about eating. But only for a few weeks. ‘I swear.’ The nurse believed her. Rebecka was such a sensible girl, not at all the type to develop an eating disorder, the nurse thought.

Things had been a bit better during the spring term. And then she had met Gustaf. Now she doesn’t starve herself, but the thoughts are still there. Even if the monster keeps to itself most of the time, it’s always there, whispering, waiting.

The terraced houses give way to detached homes. In front of her rears Olsson’s hill where the big May bonfire is lit each year. She sprints up the long steep incline. When she reaches the top, she slows down and stops.

Her heart is pounding in her chest. Her face is flushed. The music is exploding in her head. She removes her earphones.

Down below the canal runs past. Beyond it lies the church. The cemetery. And the vicarage. Where Elias lived. Where his room is now empty. Where two parents have lost their son.

They’ll see his grave whenever they look out of the window, Rebecka realises. Suddenly she’s crying.

She didn’t know Elias, and doesn’t want to revel in someone else’s misery, like Ida Holmström and her friends, yet she feels a great sadness weighing on her chest. Because what happened was so senseless. Because he could have been happy if he’d held out a little longer. And because of something else that she can’t put into words.

She wipes her tears with her sleeve and turns.

Someone is standing at the foot of the hill, gripping the handlebars of a bicycle. He or she is wearing a black hoody, similar to the one she has on, with the hood up. Rebecka can’t see the person’s face, but she knows they’re looking straight at her.

It feels like an eternity before the figure in black hops on to its bike and pedals off. Rebecka lets a few more minutes pass before she runs home.



*



When Rebecka comes in, Alma and Moa are stirring. It is nearly seven o’clock, and Rebecka starts to get breakfast ready, quietly so that she doesn’t wake her mother who came home in the small hours after her night shift at the hospital.

She puts milk, cereal, a loaf of bread and whey butter on the table. Since her father started commuting weekly to Köping, there have been many such mornings when she helps Anton and Oskar get off to school and takes Alma and Moa to nursery. Most of the time it’s okay. But sometimes she feels like Cinderella before her trans formation. Now, with the figure in the black hoody still haunting her, she’s glad to be doing something so mundane.

Rebecka goes into her brothers’ room. Oskar wrinkles his nose and groans as the light from the hallway falls across his bed. He has just turned twelve and has become taller and thinner over the summer. Even though his face is still that of a child, Rebecka has a sense of how he’ll look when he grows up. Anton, just a year younger, isn’t far behind. But when they’re asleep they look so small. Helpless.

She goes to the window and opens the blinds.

There are a thousand possible reasons why the figure in the black hoody might have been standing on the hill, he wasn’t necessarily stalking her. Rebecka doesn’t believe a single one of them.



‘Are you sure you should go to school today?’ her father asks, over breakfast.

He and Minoo are alone since her mother is at the hospital. Radio voices are reporting on world events. Her mother can’t stand having to listen to the radio in the morning, so her father takes the opportunity to do so when she’s not there.

‘The longer I wait, the harder it’ll be.’

He nods as if he understands, but he has no idea. If she were to stay at home today, rumours would immediately start to circulate. Maybe people would say she’d gone mad. Or committed suicide herself. Then when she finally came back to school, everyone would stare at her a thousand times more than they would if she went in today.

‘Might as well get it over with,’ she adds.

‘Want a lift?’

‘No, thanks.’

Her father looks at her with concern, and Minoo feels compelled to change the subject. ‘Have you made up your mind whether or not to write about it?’

‘We’re going to wait and see how things develop. There might be an investigation into the school’s responsibility in the tragedy. The boy’s parents might demand it. Then we’d find ourselves in a completely different position.’

Minoo is relieved. Mainly for selfish reasons. The sooner everyone forgets about it, the sooner she can go back to being anonymous.

She brushes her teeth and goes into her room to fetch her bag. She glances out of the window and shudders when she thinks of last night. Of the figure standing out there.

Her father waits for her in the hall, his hands clasped over his stomach, which has grown considerably over the last few years. ‘Are you sure you want to go?’

‘Yes,’ she answers, instantly regretting the irritation in her voice. She gives her father a hug.

Minoo often worries about him – he sleeps too little, works too hard, and eats too much junk food. Her grandfather, whom she never met, died of a heart attack when he was just fifty-four. Her father is fifty-three. Now and then he and her mother argue about it. These ‘discussions’, as they refer to them, are conducted in low, heated voices that Minoo isn’t supposed to hear, but sometimes her father loses his temper. ‘Save your diagnoses for your patients!’ he snaps.

At those moments Minoo hates him. If he won’t look after himself for his own sake, he ought to for theirs.

‘Ring me if you need anything,’ her father says. Minoo nods and hugs him again, extra tightly this time.



Minoo doesn’t need to hear the hushed voices in the playground to know that they’re all talking about the same thing: Elias. How he did it. The girls who found him.

‘Look, there she is,’ a few older kids whisper, as she walks past.

She pulls her backpack hard against her as she goes into the school. She lowers her head, trying to make herself invisible as she pushes her way through the bustling entrance hall. The entire school has been told to assemble in the auditorium to observe a minute’s silence for Elias.

The looks and whispers follow her. Her ears grow redder with each step she takes. Minoo can’t take it any more. She runs down the stairs to the cafeteria in the basement. At this time of the morning, no one is there except the kitchen staff. She heads for the girls’ toilets.

Only once she has shut the door can she breathe normally. She looks at her watch. If she waits a few minutes, sneaks into the auditorium as the ceremony is about to start and sits at the back, perhaps no one will notice her.

She walks up to a mirror and stares at her face. Is this how Elias was standing before he … did it? She shuts her eyes and opens them again. She tries to see her face from outside, as Max would see it.

It’s become an obsession every time she looks at herself in the mirror.

If my spots cleared up, I might be pretty, she thinks. Or all right at least.

Then she’s unsure again. How is it possible to spend so much time in front of the mirror every day and still not know what you really look like?

She thinks of when she was alone in the classroom with Max. The warmth from his hand. She feels it again and it spreads throughout her body. Why did she run away? What would have happened if she’d stayed?

The door is thrown open with a bang. Minoo spins around. Linnéa’s standing there.

‘Hi,’ Minoo says, wondering if what she was thinking might be printed across her forehead.

‘Hi,’ Linnéa answers, and walks in.

She’s wearing black jeans and a long black hoody. She looks Minoo up and down. ‘Hiding again?’ she asks, with a hint of a smile.

Minoo ought to be angry with her, but she can’t be. The harsh words that were said yesterday don’t count: too petty in view of what happened.

‘Can we forget what I said yesterday?’ Linnéa asks, as if she had just been thinking the same thing.

‘Sure.’ Minoo tries to shrug with a degree of indifference. ‘How are you doing?’ she blurts out. Not the most sensitive question to ask someone who had found their best friend dead in a toilet.

Linnéa looks as if she’s about to say something sarcastic, but then her face softens. ‘I wasn’t going to come in today,’ she says quietly, ‘but I felt I had to, for Elias’s sake.’

Minoo thinks of her own selfish reasons for not staying at home, and is happy that Linnéa isn’t looking at her. Her gaze is directed somewhere else, almost as if she’s looking inside herself. She nibbles the tip of her bright pink thumbnail.

‘I wish more people had known him,’ she says. ‘He could be so funny. And considerate.’

Minoo is uncertain how to answer. ‘Shall we go?’ she says, after a moment’s hesitation.

Linnéa nods and walks out ahead of her.

The entrance hall is now empty, except for a few stragglers hurrying towards the auditorium.

‘Are you all right?’ Minoo asks, before they go in.

The murmuring from the auditorium sounds like a gigantic beehive.

‘No,’ Linnéa answers, with her hard little smile. ‘But I never am.’