Popular Music. Mikael Niemi

on my own. I bend quickly forwards, like a Muslim with my backside in the air, lower my head and mumble a prayer of gratitude. I notice an iron plate engraved with Tibetan writing, a text I am unable to understand but one that exudes solemnity, spirituality, and I bend further down to kiss the text.

      At that very moment a memory comes back to me. A vertiginous pit down into my childhood. A tube through time down which someone is shouting out a warning, but it’s too late.

      I’m stuck fast.

      My damp lips are frozen onto a Tibetan prayer plaque. And when I try to loosen my lips by wetting them with my tongue, that sticks fast as well.

      Every single child from the far north of Sweden has no doubt found itself in the same plight. A freezing cold winter’s day, a railing, a lamp post, a piece of iron coated in hoar frost. My own memory is suddenly crystal clear. I’m five years old, and my lips are frozen onto the keyhole of our front door in Pajala. My first reaction one of vast astonishment. A keyhole that can be touched without more ado by a mitten or even a bare finger. But now it’s a devilish trap. I try to yell, but that’s not easy when your tongue is stuck fast to the metal. I struggle with my arms, trying to tear myself loose by force, but the pain forces me to give up. The cold makes my tongue numb, my mouth is filled with the taste of blood. I kick against the door in desperation, and emit an agonized:

      ‘Aaahhh, aaahhh…’

      Then Mum appears. She’s carrying a bowl of warm water, she pours it over the keyhole and my lips thaw out and I’m freed. Bits of skin are still sticking to the metal, and I resolve never to do that ever again.

      ‘Aaahhh, aaahhh,’ I mumble as the snow starts lashing into me. Nobody can hear me. If there are any hikers on their way up, they’ll no doubt turn back now. My backside is sticking into the air, the wind is whipping up and making it colder by the minute. My mouth is starting to go numb. I pull off my gloves and try to warm myself loose with my hands, panting away with my hot breath. But it’s all in vain. The metal absorbs the heat but remains icy cold. I try to lift up the iron plaque, to wrench it loose, but it’s firmly anchored and doesn’t shift an inch. My back is covered in cold sweat. The wind worms its way inside my anorak lining and I start shivering. Low clouds are gathering and enveloping the pass in mist. Dangerous. Bloody dangerous. I’m getting more and more scared. I’m going to die here. I’ll never last out the night frozen onto a Tibetan prayer plaque.

      There’s only one possibility left. I must wrench myself free.

      The very thought makes me feel sick, but I have no choice. Just a little tug first, as a test. I can feel the pain right back to the root of my tongue. One…two…now…

      Red. Blood. And pain so extreme I have to beat my head against the iron. It’s not possible. My mouth is stuck just as firmly as before. My whole face would fall apart if I tugged any harder.

      A knife. If only I had a knife. I feel for my rucksack with my foot, but it’s several metres away. Fear is churning my stomach, my bladder feels about to burst. I open my zip and get ready to pee on all fours, like a cow.

      Then I pause. Feel for the mug that’s hanging from my belt. Fill it full of pee, then pour the contents over my mouth. It trickles over my lips, starts the thawing process, and a few seconds later I’m free.

      I’ve pissed myself free.

      I stand up. My prayers are over. My tongue and lips are stiff and tender. But I can move them again. At last I can start my story.

       Chapter 1

      —in which Pajala enters the modern age, music comes into being and two little boys set out, travelling light

      It was the beginning of the sixties when tarmacked roads came to our part of Pajala. I was five at the time and could hear the noise as they approached. A column of what looked like tanks came crawling past our house, digging and scratching at the potholed dirt road. It was early summer. Men in overalls marched around straddle-legged, spitting out wads of snuff, wielding crowbars and muttering away in Finnish while housewives peered out from behind the curtains. It was incredibly exciting for a little kid. I clung to the fence, peeping out through the rails, and breathed in the diesel fumes oozing out of those armoured monsters. They prodded and poked into the winding village road as if it were an old carcass. A mud road with lots and lots of holes that used to fill with rain, a pock-marked surface that turned butter-soft every spring when the thaw came, and in summer it was salted like a minced meat loaf to prevent dust flying around. The dirt road was old-fashioned. It belonged to a bygone age, the one our parents had been born into but were now determined to put behind them, once and for all.

      Our district was known locally in Finnish as Vittu-lajänkkä, which means something like Cuntsmire. It’s not clear how the name originated, but it probably has to do with so many babies being born here. There were five children in some of the houses, sometimes even more, and the name became a sort of crude tribute to female fertility. Vittulajänkkä, or Vittula as it’s sometimes shortened to, was populated by poor villagers who grew up during the hardship years of the thirties. Thanks to hard work and a booming economy they worked their way up the ladder and managed to borrow money to buy a house of their own. Sweden was flourishing, the economy was expanding, and even Tornedalen in the far north was being swept along with the tide. Progress had been so astonishingly fast that people still felt poverty-stricken even though they were now rich. They occasionally worried that it might all be taken away from them again. Housewives trembled behind their home-made curtains whenever they thought about how well-off they were. A whole house for themselves and their offspring! They’d been able to afford new clothes, and the children didn’t need to wear hand-me-downs and patches. They’d even acquired a car. And now the dirt road was about to disappear, and be crowned with oily-black asphalt. Poverty would be clothed in a black leather jacket. What was being laid was the future, as smooth as a shaven cheek. Children would cycle along it on their new bikes, heading for welfare and a degree in engineering.

      The bulldozers bellowed and roared. Gravel poured out of the heavy lorries. Enormous steamrollers compressed the hard core with such incomprehensible force that I wanted to stick my five-year-old foot underneath to test them. I threw big stones in front of a steamroller, then ran out to look for them when it had rumbled past, but there was no sign of the stones. They’d disappeared, pure magic. It was uncanny and fascinating. I lay my hand on the flattened-out surface. It felt strangely cold. How could coarse gravel become as smooth as a newly-pressed sheet? I threw out a fork taken from the kitchen drawer, and then my plastic spade, and both of them disappeared without trace. Even today I’m not sure whether they are still concealed there in the hard core, or if they did in fact dissolve in some magical way.

      

      It was around this time that my elder sister bought her first record player. I sneaked into her room when she was away at school. It was on her desk, a piece of technical wizardry in black plastic, a shiny little box with a transparent lid concealing remarkable knobs and buttons. Scattered all round it were curlers, lipstick and aerosol cans. Everything was modern, unnecessary luxuries, a sign of our new riches heralding a future of waste and welfare. A lacquered box contained piles of film stars and cinema tickets. Sis collected them, and had fat bundles from Wilhelmsson’s cinema, each one with the name of the film, the leading actors and marks out of ten written on the back.

      She’d placed the only single she owned on a plastic contraption looking like a plate rack. I’d been made to cross my heart and promise never even to breathe on it. Now, my fingers tingling, I picked it up and stroked the shiny cover depicting a handsome young man playing a guitar. He had a dark lock of hair dangling down over his forehead, and was smiling straight at me. Ever so painstakingly I slid out the black vinyl. I carefully lifted the lid of the record player. Tried to remember how sis had done it, and lowered the record onto the turntable. Fitted the hole of the EP over the central pin. And so full of expectation that I’d broken out into a sweat, I switched on.

      The turntable gave a little jerk, then started spinning. The tension