The Circle (Hammer)

9



SLOWLY VANESSA TAKES off her clothes, one item at a time. Her body is aglow in the light from the campfire. Lucky lets out a raunchy whistle, and Wille punches his arm, a little harder than necessary. Vanessa smiles.

God, she loves being drunk. All the sharp edges disappear and problems fade into insignificance. The freaky shit that happened in front of the mirror and at Jonte’s house – none of it matters. The fact that Linnéa Wallin still calls Wille doesn’t matter. Soon nothing will matter at all. In two years she’ll be an adult. In two years she’ll leave school. Then she’ll get into a car, leave this town and never look back, not once. Until then she plans to enjoy life to the hilt.

Vanessa is down to her bra and pants now. She snatches the bottle of home-brew and Coke from Wille’s hand and has a few gulps. Then she starts dancing, slowly, as if she can hear some sexy melody inside her head and just has to move to it. She wishes Michelle and Evelina were here, but on the other hand it’s fun being the only girl.

‘Christ! Do you have to put on a strip show in front of everyone?’ Wille mutters.

She ignores him and turns to the others. ‘Anybody got a cigarette?’

All five dig in their pockets. Mehmet, good-looking but too short, holds out a lit one. As she takes it from him, she accidentally brushes his fingers. He sniggers nervously. She can almost hear his erection.

‘Isn’t Jonte coming?’ Lucky asks, without taking his eyes off Vanessa.

‘He didn’t feel like it,’ Wille tells him.

‘Good,’ says Vanessa. ‘I’m so f*cking tired of Jonte.’

Scattered laughter among the boys. Wille looks irritated.

‘I’m going for a swim,’ she says, and heads for the water. The full moon is lit up like a huge spotlight above the lake. The nights have taken on a deep autumnal blackness and the air smells of earth and fungi.

Vanessa flicks away her cigarette, which fizzles when it hits the water. Then she pulls off her bra and pants, tosses them behind her and dips her foot into the water. It’s colder than she expected, but she wades out. When the water reaches her waist, she dives in.

Dammsjön Lake swallows her. The coldness of the water clears her head a little, and she swims a few strokes. It’s dark and silent. The water caresses her body as she glides towards the surface and breaks through it.

Vanessa takes a deep breath. She treads water and runs her fingers through her hair, pressing it flat against her head. Then she looks back at the beach. The campfire is a little speck of light in the encompassing darkness. The forest is a compact mass swaying slowly in the wind.

Wille’s white T-shirt glows in the dark as he walks towards the water’s edge. ‘Come back!’ he shouts.

‘You come here,’ she shouts back, and fends off the mosquito buzzing around her head.

‘It’s f*cking freezing!’

She doesn’t answer, and instead dives again. Her body has got used to the cold now. She does underwater somer saults, tumbling over and over until she barely knows which way is up. When the air in her lungs is almost exhausted, she launches herself upward and almost feels the first twinge of panic before she finally breaks the surface. She was deeper than she’d thought. She looks towards the beach again.

Wille has stripped to his underwear, and is standing knee-deep in the water.

‘For f*ck’s saaake!’ he shouts, and Vanessa laughs.

‘You’re such an old woman,’ she yells back.

Wille wades out further and sinks down till the water reaches his shoulders. He keeps on swearing.

‘It’ll feel really good once you’re in, I promise,’ she calls teasingly.

‘You always make promises you can’t keep!’

That makes Vanessa think of Linnéa. How Wille had promised they weren’t in touch any more.

Vanessa isn’t the jealous type, except when it comes to Linnéa. Because she knows that it was she who dumped him. If she hadn’t, maybe they’d still be together. But Vanessa has no intention of mentioning the phone call. She won’t let anyone see that Linnéa makes her feel insecure. Besides, she despises girls who secretly check their boyfriends’ mobiles.

Wille takes big strokes. She can make out his features now. Soon he reaches her and puts his arms around her. Their wet faces meet and she kisses him. Their bodies glide easily towards each other beneath the surface.

‘You’re so f*cking sexy,’ Wille whispers, in that voice. The one that makes her feel warm inside.

‘Look who’s talking,’ she murmurs, running her finger along the elastic waistband of his briefs. ‘Go and get a blanket.’

‘The usual spot?’ Wille asks, with a drunken smile.

She nods and they kiss again.

‘Hurry up,’ she whispers, then kicks away, doing a few strokes on her back.

Wille teases her for always wanting sex, but he loves her for it, she knows. He thinks it’s all his doing, that he’s so incredible in bed she just can’t have enough of him. But Vanessa has always loved sex. Even the first time, when everyone said it was supposed to hurt. Having sex for her is like being drunk. It makes her forget everything she doesn’t want to think about. It makes her feel like the centre of the universe.

Vanessa shivers as she steps out of the water. Her body feels heavy on land. She hasn’t sobered up nearly as much as she’d thought. She staggers as she bends to pick up her underwear and pulls it on.

When she looks up she sees the moon again. It’s blood red. She’s never seen anything like it.

Wille is lying on the blanket, waiting for her, as she enters the little cluster of trees. Their spot.

‘Have you seen the moon?’ she asks.

Wille doesn’t answer, just pats the blanket next to him. She lies down and he immediately rolls on top of her. Suddenly she feels the earth move beneath her. ‘I feel sick,’ she says and shoves him away.

A moment’s dizziness, and then she feels something take control of her body. She sits up involuntarily.

‘What are you doing?’ Wille asks, far away.

Vanessa feels dizzy again. Her perspective is askew. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. She feels her body rise and yanks at the blanket so hard that Wille rolls off it. Then she wraps it around herself and starts to walk. Her feet find their way, in spite of the darkness and the ground, which is littered with rocks and holes. Her legs are steady.

Wille grabs her shoulder and spins her around. He looks worried and she wants to calm him, but she can’t speak. She pulls free of him and walks out into the night. Somewhere nearby a raven caws.

‘Well f*cking forget it then!’ Wille shouts after her.

I must be really hammered, Vanessa thinks.



Anna-Karin is sitting in her room in front of the computer. She’s staring at the screen, at the chats taking place.

In primary school, she had created a profile on one of the most popular sites. She still gets angry when she thinks about it, angry that she could have been so stupid as to imagine she could make friends. Of course they’d found her. Erik Forslund and Ida had tricked her into revealing her password. She’ll never forget the pictures they put up. The things they wrote.

The profile is still there. Naturally they had changed the password so that she couldn’t delete the account. Sometimes she goes in and looks at it, just to remind herself that she can never trust anyone. It’s a scab she can’t stop picking at.

Often she reads other people’s blogs where they write about their lives. People who think that what they’ve just eaten for dinner or what they’re wearing is so important that they have to share it with the world.

When somebody complains too much about their non-problems, she gets so annoyed that she has to write something nasty. Then she lies awake for hours, terrified that the blogger will manage to track her down.

Now she’s checking a blog by Evelina, Vanessa Dahl’s friend. In her latest entry she’s written how sad it is that a guy in her year just committed suicide. In the entry below it she’s posted a picture of herself with Jari Mäkinen. Their faces are pressed together so tightly it must have hurt. It looks as if she’s holding on to his back. Anna-Karin thinks she looks like one of those hot music video girls.

Me and my boy Jari … 2 hot 4 school!!!:P

Anna-Karin’s cheeks feel hot in the glare from the screen. It’s so f*cking ridiculous the way Evelina clings to the senior boys. But Anna-Karin would like nothing better than to be Evelina in that picture.

Alone in her room, she studies every pixel in Jari’s face. She’s looked at him often over the years. Looked, peeked, even stared, when she’s been sure no one could see her. Jari’s father helps her mother and Grandpa on the farm sometimes, and when Jari was younger he used to come too. Each time Anna-Karin would hide in her room until he’d gone home.

She is about to write something nasty to Evelina in the comment box when her legs tingle, as if they’ve fallen asleep.

Then she stands up so forcefully that her chair skitters across the room. That wasn’t me, she thinks, in horror. That wasn’t me.



When Minoo wakes up she’s standing in the garden in her pyjamas. She’s wearing her slippers. The last thing she remembers is lying on her bed, studying. She must have fallen asleep.

Panic bubbles inside her as her feet begin to move with a will of their own. She walks through the garden and out on to the street.

Is this a dream? No. She’s sure it isn’t. She tries to stop, turn around, run the other way, but her body moves forward inexorably.

The streets are empty, the night silent. All she can hear is the plastic soles of her slippers scraping along the tarmac and the sound of her breathing. She tries to scream, but can only produce a whimper.

It feels bizarre to try to think logically in a situation that is so completely absurd, but that’s all Minoo can do to quell her panic. She tries to remember if she’s read about anything like this, but her thoughts keep heading off in directions that terrify her even more. Mental illness. Possession.

In the end she tries to stop thinking altogether.

Minoo reaches the national road and sees a lorry hurtling towards her from the left. Her body doesn’t slow down but steps on to the tarmac. The lorry blasts its horn. Minoo screams inside herself. The ground vibrates beneath her feet as they continue marching resolutely forwards. She steels herself for the moment of impact, when her body will be crushed and smeared across the road.

But it never comes.

She can’t work out whether it’s the metal monster or just its backdraught that buffets her. The vehicle lets out a prolonged blast of its horn without slowing, but Minoo is safely on the other side of the road.

Her feet start climbing the steep embankment that runs alongside the national road. She slips on the damp grass and loses a slipper. The ground feels cold against the sole of her foot as she continues her ascent. The moon is glowing in the black sky. It is an unnatural red.

That can’t be right, she thinks.

When she reaches the top, she starts walking along the train tracks. After a while she loses her other slipper.

The forest closes in around the railway, the harsh moonlight illuminating the lines. Minoo thinks it’s strange that the moon is red, but its light seems normal.

She listens nervously for an approaching train.

The line is seldom used at night, but sometimes long freight trains come through that she can hear from her house.

She catches sight of a little stream and alongside it the old dirt track. It’s almost never used now because the national road was built through Engelsfors. Only a few stray mushroom pickers or horse riders ever make their way out here.

Suddenly Minoo changes direction. She slides down the embankment and on to the dirt track. Her legs are stiff, but they continue moving forwards.

The gravel hurts her feet. She hears wings beating above her. Ahead she sees Kärrgruvan, the long-since-closed fairground. The wire fence that surrounds it is broken in several places. The tall bushes, once carefully trimmed into all sorts of imaginative shapes, have been allowed to grow wild.

Minoo walks through the arched gateway with KÅRRGRUVAN mounted above it, and past the old ticket office, which has been boarded up with rotting planks. She sees the round dance pavilion with the pointed roof that makes it look like a circus tent. Further away there is a dilapidated red stall with HOT DOGS in white lettering across the top of the closed service window.

Somehow this place seems even more desolate and threatening when you know that it was once full of life, laughter and eager anticipation.

But it’s not completely deserted, Minoo now notices.

Someone is standing in the shadows by the dance pavilion.

Minoo’s feet stop. The figure breaks away from the shadows and takes on solid form. Minoo immediately recognises him.

It’s the school caretaker.