Popular Music. Mikael Niemi

I was betraying somebody, my mother perhaps. Eyes closed, I curled myself up more tightly, resting my chin on my knees. She was so cold, but I was warm and young, a small, glowing ember. And when I pricked up my ears I could hear her whispering. A faint sighing through a damper or the remains of a cut-off pipe – tender, comforting words of love.

      Then there was a clattering noise. The caretaker stormed into the shed. He was furious, threatening to beat the living daylights out of any bloody brats he found in here. I held my breath and listened to him charging around, searching, heaving aside furniture, shoving and kicking at piles of rubbish, as if hunting down rats. He charged round and round the shed, growling out threats: no doubt somebody in the Pearly-Girly School had seen me and blabbed to the caretaker. And now it was all buggers and bastards and death threats, in both Swedish and Finnish.

      He stopped right next to the boiler, and seemed to be sniffing the air. As if he were onto a scent. I could hear a scraping noise against the metal plating, and realised he was leaning against her. The only thing separating us was three centimetres of iron skin.

      The seconds ebbed away. Then another scrape, and the sound of footsteps fading into the distance. The shed door slammed shut with a bang. I stayed where I was. Didn’t move a muscle as the minutes ticked by. Suddenly there was the clomping of the wooden clogs again. He’d only pretended to go away in order to flush out his young prey with the cunning of a grown man. But now he gave up, this time he left for real, I could hear his footsteps fading away on the gravel outside.

      At last I was able to move. My joints were aching, and I pushed at the door. It was stuck. I pushed harder. It wouldn’t budge. I broke out in a cold sweat. Fear grew into panic. The caretaker must have accidentally brushed against the handle. I was locked in.

      Once the immediate paralysis began to wear off, I started screaming. The echo magnified my voice, I stuck my fingers in my ears and bellowed out over and over again.

      But nobody came.

      Hoarse and exhausted, I collapsed in a heap. Was I doomed to die? Die of thirst, shrivel up in my sarcophagus?

      The first day was awful. My muscles ached, I had cramp in my legs. I had no option but to sit curled up, and my back grew stiff. Thirst was driving me mad. The heat given off by my body condensed on the sooty walls, I could feel it dripping and tried to lick it. It tasted metallic, and only made me feel even more thirsty.

      The second day I was completely overcome by exhaustion. I dozed for hour after hour. The emptiness felt liberating. I lost all trace of time. I slid in and out of contented oblivion and realised I was dying.

      The next time I came to my senses it was obvious that a considerable length of time had passed. The greenish light of day that seeped in through the ventilator was fainter now. Days were growing shorter. It was getting much colder at night, and soon there was frost as well. I kept warm by jerking my muscles one after another.

      I don’t remember much of winter. I curled up in a ball and slept most of the time. I was in a trance as weeks passed by. When the spring warmth finally returned, I discovered I had grown. My clothes felt tight and uncomfortable. I wriggled and squiggled and managed to take them off, and resumed my waiting naked.

      Gradually my body filled more and more of the cramped space. Several years must have passed. The damp given off by my body had started the iron rusting, and I had flakes of rust in my tousled hair. I could no longer move up and down, only sway from side to side like a duck. If the doors were to open now, the hole would be too small for me to climb out anyway.

      Eventually it became almost unbearable. I couldn’t even move from side to side any more. My head was jammed in between my knees. There was no room for my shoulders to grow any broader.

      For several weeks I was convinced it was all over.

      In the end everything came to a full stop. I occupied the whole of the space. There was no room to breathe properly any more, all I could manage was a series of short gasps. But I kept growing even so.

      Then it happened one night. A faint cracking noise. Like when a pocket mirror breaks. A brief pause, then a slow crunching noise from behind me. When I tensed my muscles and pressed backwards, the wall gave way. Bulged out then burst open in a cloud of splinters, and I shot out into the world.

      Naked, newly born, I crawled around through the rubbish. Stood up on very shaky legs and supported myself against a bookcase. To my surprise, I noticed that the whole world had shrunk. No, it was me who’d doubled in size. I’d sprouted pubic hair. I’d grown up.

      It was a bitterly cold winter night outside. Not a soul in sight. I ploughed my way through the snow and scampered barefoot through the village, still stark naked. At the crossroads between the chemist’s and the kiosk, four youths were lying in the middle of the road. They seemed to be asleep. I stopped and stared down at them in surprise. Bent down to examine them more closely in the light from the street lamp.

      One of the youths was me.

      Feeling very odd, I lay down next to myself on the icy road. It was cold against my skin, melted and turned damp.

      I started to wait. They’d wake up soon enough.

       Chapter 4

      —in which the village children start at the Old School, they learn about southern Sweden, and a homework session ends in a hell of a row

      One overcast morning in August the bell rang, and I started school. Class one. Mum and I marched solemnly into the tall, yellow-painted wooden building that housed the infants’ section – an old school imaginatively named the Old School. We were piloted up a creaky staircase and into a classroom on the first floor, strode over broad, yellowed floorboards with a thick, shiny coat of varnish, and were each shepherded into an antique school desk with a wooden lid, a pen box and a hole for an inkwell. The lid was covered in carvings made by the knives of generations of pupils. The mums all trooped out, and we were left behind. Twenty young kids with loose milk teeth and knuckles covered in warts. Some had speech defects, others wore glasses, many spoke Finnish at home, several were used to receiving a good hiding if they stepped out of line, nearly everybody was shy and came from working-class homes, and knew from the start they didn’t belong here.

      Our teacher was a matron in her sixties with round, steel-framed glasses, her hair in a bun contained by a net and pierced with pins, and she had a long, hooked nose that made her look like an owl. She always wore a woollen skirt and a blouse, often a cardigan buttoned halfway up, and soft, black shoes like slippers. She approached her duties gently but firmly, intent on carving out of the roughly sawn planks confronting her something neat and presentable, and capable of coping with Swedish society.

      To begin with, we all had to go to the blackboard and write our names. Some could, others couldn’t. On the basis of that scientific test, our teacher divided the class into two groups, called Group One and Group Two. Group One comprised all those who had passed the test – most of the girls and a few sons of civil service clerks. The rest were in Group Two, including Niila and me. We were only seven, but correctly classified right from the start.

      Hanging from the wall in front of the class were The Letters of the Alphabet. A scary army of sticks and half-moons stretching all the way across. Those were the things we were required to wrestle with, one after another: force them down on their backs in our exercise books and make them do as they were told. We were given pencils as well, and chalks in a cardboard box, a reading book about Li and Lo, and a stiff sheet of cardboard with blocks of watercolour paints that looked like brightly coloured sweets. Then we had to get down to work. The inside of the desk lid had to be lined with paper, and the books as well: there was a deafening crackling and rustling from the rolls of wax-paper we’d brought from home, and some eager snipping with blunt school scissors. Finally we stuck a timetable onto the inside of our desk lids with tape. Nobody had the slightest inkling of what all those mysterious squares actually meant, but the timetable was an essential part of things, part of being Neat and Orderly, and it meant our childhood was over. Now