Gein’s home had looked like an exhibition space.
There were four noses, a large quantity of intact human bones and fragments of bones, one head in a paper bag, another in a canvas bag, and nine labia in a shoebox. Gein had fashioned bowls and bed frames out of human skulls, seats and face masks out of human skin, a belt of women’s nipples and a lampshade with the skin of a face. They also found ten women’s heads with their scalps sawn off, as well as a pair of lips as the toggle on a roller blind.
Gender and bestiality belong together, which is why she’s stapled the photograph of the snake swallowing the egg to the article about Ed Gein.
Another part of the picture is being despised by other people. But what comes first? Loathing yourself, others, or your own sexuality?
As far as Andrei Chikatilo is concerned, people disliked him because of what they saw as the offensively feminine way he moved, his sloping shoulders, his whole appearance, actually, and they were disgusted by his habit of constantly touching his genitals. He murdered and ate parts of his victims because he couldn’t get sexually aroused any other way. He followed his reptilian, primitive urges. One central part of Ed Gein’s complex case was his desire to have a sex change and transform himself into his own mother. He tried to make a costume from the skin of women’s corpses that he dug up, so he could wear it and become a woman.
The article refers to an interrogation where the ritual was described as transsexual, and in the margin Victoria had noted with a red pen:
THE REPTILE CHANGES ITS SKIN.
MAN BECOMES WOMAN, WOMAN BECOMES MAN.
BLURRED GENDER IDENTITY/SEXUAL BELONGING.
EAT – SLEEP – FUCK.
Needs, she thinks, remembering what she read during her studies about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. She also recalls where she was when she read about it. In Sierra Leone, more specifically in the kitchen of the house they were renting outside Freetown, just before Solace came into the room. Victoria had been eating her father’s disgusting porridge, with far too much sweetened cinnamon.
While she pretends to eat the porridge she thinks about what she’s read about the hierarchy of needs, which starts with physiological needs. Needs such as food and sleep. She thinks how he is systematically denying them to her. After that comes the need for security, then the need for love and belonging, and then the need for esteem. All things he has denied her, and is continuing to deny her. At the top of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualisation, a term she can’t even understand. As far as her needs are concerned, he has denied her everything.
Now she knows.
She created the Reptile in order to be able to eat and sleep.
Later in life she also used the Reptile to be able to make love. When she and Lasse slept together, it was the Reptile that allowed him inside, because that was the only way for her to enjoy a man’s body. And the Reptile had group sex with Lasse in a nightclub in Toronto. But when she slept with Jeanette the Reptile wasn’t present, she’s quite sure of that, and the realisation fills her with a joy so intense it makes her eyes water.
But what else has the Reptile done? Has it killed?
She thinks about Samuel Bai.
She had met him outside a McDonald’s at Medborgarplatsen, and had taken him home and drugged him. Then she had showered and, when he woke up again and was still groggy, she had revealed her body to him, luring him to her and finally killing him by smashing a hammer into his right eye.
The bestiality of the Reptile. The bestiality of the murderer. She had enjoyed it.
Or had she?
She gets up from the kitchen table, so quickly that the chair topples over onto the floor, and hurries into the living room. The sofa, she thinks, the bloodstain on the sofa that Jeanette once came close to seeing. Samuel’s blood.
She literally turns the sofa upside down, examining the cushions and upholstery down to the smallest detail, but the stain isn’t there. It isn’t there because it had never been there.
The Reptile isn’t her hunger fire. It’s a fake, imaginary libido.
She laughs again and sits down on the sofa.
Everything that happened from when she met Samuel at Medborgarplatsen to when she was sitting here fresh from the shower is true. But she never attacked him with a hammer.
All she had done was throw him out when he started pawing at her.
Simple as that.
The last time she saw Samuel was when she threw him out. She’s sure of that now.
He had enemies, and had been beaten up several times. A fight that got out of hand? It’s up to the police to find that out. Not her.
She goes back into the kitchen and opens the fridge. A dirty beetroot and a few eggs. She gets two out and rolls them in her hand. Two unfertilised female sex cells, cold against her palm.
She shuts the fridge, gets an aluminium bowl out of the cupboard above the sink, and cracks the eggs. Then two hundred and fifty grams of sugar, four tablespoons of cocoa, two teaspoons of vanilla sugar, one hundred grams of butter, one hundred and fifty grams of flour and half a teaspoon of salt.
She stirs the mixture with a fork before she starts to eat it.
The Reptile is cold-blooded and enjoys being a living creature. It suns itself on the beach or on a warm rock in a summer meadow. She remembers how, as a little reptile, she had burrowed her head into her father’s armpit; the smell of his sweat was security, and in there she could feel what it was like to be an animal, without any self-assumed responsibility for feelings and deeds.
That’s the only memory she has of ever feeling secure with her father. No matter what else he went on to do, that memory is priceless.
At the same time she knows she never had a chance to satisfy her own daughter’s needs. Madeleine has no memories of her, no memories of her mum.
No security at all.
Madeleine must hate me, she thinks.
Institute of Pathology
JEANETTE FEELS A pang of disappointment. When she woke up and found the bed empty she had hoped Sofia was in the shower or downstairs in the kitchen making breakfast for them. She hadn’t said anything to suggest she was in a hurry to get home. But Jeanette still has a smile on her face as she lets the duvet slip down to her feet and rolls onto her back, stretching her arms and legs out and looking at her naked body.
The night was wonderful, and she can still detect Sofia’s scent, as if she were still close by.
Almost electric, Jeanette thinks.
As if Sofia’s touch had charged her with electricity. An intense, sparking red pulse.
They had talked and made love until four o’clock, when Jeanette, sweaty and breathless, had said she felt like a teenager in love, but that they really did have to bear in mind that there was a new day ahead.