I Am Behind You (25 page)

The white figure is lying on its stomach on the grass, just a few metres away from her. Its big, dark eyes look into hers. As if she was wearing the wrong glasses, Isabelle has difficulty focusing on the face. As soon as she tries, the image blurs.

It has no hair. Its skin is chalk-white, and is completely lacking in any indication of age. No wrinkles or variations in pigmentation. The ears and nose are no more than suggestions, slight protuberances with holes in the skull. Isabelle screws up her eyes and tries to make out the mouth, but there is no mouth. Taken as a whole, the face is no more than a setting for the eyes

the eyes

which are looking straight into Isabelle.

It is said that eyes are expressive. That they can be sad or happy or indifferent. In fact they are simply two spheres, incapable of expressing anything without the help of the muscles surrounding them. The angle of the eyebrows, a wrinkling of the nose, the shape of the mouth: altogether these elements formulate what a person wishes to communicate, while the eyes remain a pair of lifeless globes of vitreous jelly.

The figure in front of Isabelle lacks anything that could help with an interpretation. There are only those eyes, two dark wells, the iris and pupil barely distinguishable. It is a gaze totally without intention, without evaluation, without calculation. It is a
pure
gaze that washes over Isabelle, sweeping away her aching body, the taste of blood in her mouth, the pounding in her head.

She crawls towards the figure, whispering: ‘Here I am. I'm here now.'

The white figure gives no sign of having heard her. It remains lying flat on its stomach on the grass, its head raised a fraction so that
it can look at Isabelle. She keeps on crawling until their faces are no more than a few centimetres apart. Isabelle's eyes are dry, because she has not blinked since their eyes met. She doesn't want to blink and break the contact, but she has to. She blinks.

Just like that day on the catwalk, it is as if time slows down. Isabelle sees her eyelids slowly slide down over her eyes like a curtain being lowered. Then she is in darkness; she has to make a real effort to force her eyes open again, but it is a slow, difficult process. First there is a tiny gap that lets in a hint of light, then they open in slow motion, gradually widening and letting in the world.

By the time her eyes are fully open, the figure is standing up. It has no sex organs or nipples. It has no fingernails. There is nothing but white skin, like the first draft of a human being, or the final phase of a human being, when everything that is unnecessary has been removed. It turns and moves away from her.

‘Please,' Isabelle whispers. ‘Please…'

Only when the white figure is several metres away does Isabelle realise that Carina is still screaming.

*

There are many things Carina regrets from her youth, but if there is one thing she would sacrifice a great deal to erase from her past, it is the night she saw the tiger.

Summer 1991. She was eighteen years old. The gang she hung out with consisted mainly of older boys and girls. Some were minor criminals, or worse; some were on drugs of various kinds, and some just thought that everything was crap.

They would meet up at someone's place and drink, shoot up or sniff whatever happened to be around while listening to music that often belonged to the White Power genre, since several members of the gang had sympathies in that direction.

Carina had no sympathies in any direction whatsoever. From time to time the boys—they were mainly boys—would sit and talk to her
about the Swedish tribe, the dangers of contaminating the race, pride in their heritage, the battle that must be fought. Carina thought it all sounded okay. Most things sounded okay as long as she was drunk enough. Communism and world revolution and unrestricted immigration would have been fine too, as long as she could drink with people who had no plans for life, or even the next day.

The week before she saw the tiger, something had happened that was not okay. She had got completely pissed at a party and collapsed on a sofa to the sound of ‘Hurrah for the Nordic Lands' by Ultima Thule. When she woke up in the morning with the hangover from hell, she was naked from the waist down and there was dried semen on her thighs. By that stage she had sunk so low that she didn't really care. Shit happens. She staggered to the bathroom to have a shower.

When she had pulled off her T-shirt, she glanced at herself in the cracked mirror. She looked fucking terrible. Her hair was sticking out in all directions, her mascara had run and her eyes were red. She wondered who on earth had managed to rape such a monster.

Her right shoulder was swollen and inflamed, and at first she thought the bastard must have bitten her. Then she saw the black symbols, clearly visible against the red skin. Two eights. She knew all too well what they stood for; a couple of the guys had the same thing.

The hangover had turned her brain into a ball of spikes bouncing around inside her skull as she sat down on the toilet and put her head in her hands.

No. Fuck. No.

For the first time in months Carina took a step back and looked at herself. She was sitting in a bathroom that stank of piss and vomit in a disgusting apartment, with people lying around sleeping off whatever they had taken. During the night someone (or more than one person?) had taken the opportunity to rape her while she was unconscious, and had finished off, or possibly started, by tattooing
Heil Hitler
on her shoulder.

This was her life. This was what it had come to.

As she stood in the shower letting the hot water flow over her
skin, she felt as if she was washing something away, as if she was being cleansed. She thought there might be a chance to start again. Perhaps this could be the turning point, the wake-up call.

She found a relatively clean towel and wrapped it around herself, then went searching for her underwear and jeans. When she found them she would leave the apartment and…register with Komvux, the adult education service, see if she could get some qualifications. Sort out a job at McDonald's, anything. Go to the right places, fill in the right forms, make the right calls.

Before she found her jeans she came across a bottle of vodka with a reasonable amount left in the bottom. She sat down in an armchair and took a couple of swigs, just to get her thoughts in order. Then a couple more. And that was the end of that.

When she was out on the town with the gang a week later after a major session of front-loading, it was all forgotten and forgiven, or at least it was as unimportant as everything else. She had been fucked and pricked, as someone put it, and it was just one of those things, of no significance. She didn't know who had done it, and she didn't care. No yesterday, no tomorrow, no problems. As the gang moved along Sveavägen heading for Monte Carlo, they were invincible, pulsating with an energy that came from the knowledge that they owned the city, they owned the night.

A plastic bottle of bootleg vodka and Coke laced with quarter of a gram of speed was passed around the group, which consisted of Carina, three guys who were all into White Power, plus a girl she hadn't met before who belonged to one of the guys. Her name was Jannika; she had empty eyes and wore a bomber jacket and a short, neon yellow skirt. She laughed much too loudly at everything that was said.

As they were passing the offices of Bonniers publishing house, Micke gave the Sieg Heil salute to the Jewish mafia, which made Jannika fall about laughing. She carried on laughing as they walked on, and after about a hundred metres she announced that as a result she needed a pee. By then they had reached the junction of
Tunnelgatan and Sveavägen, and weren't far from Monte Carlo.

‘Cross your legs, for fuck's sake,' Johan said. ‘We're nearly there.'

‘Can't,' Jannika whimpered. ‘I need to go now.'

Micke looked around and saw the plaque on the ground that marked the spot where Olof Palme had been assassinated. ‘Piss there,' he said, pointing.

‘
There?
'

‘Why the fuck not? Piss on Palme. I mean, he was always cuddling up to the blacks. Piss on him.'

Jannika giggled and grabbed her crotch, then she went over, pulled down her pants and squatted over the plaque. Urine splashed down onto the metal and trickled away between the paving stones.

‘Piss on Palme,' Johan mumbled, taking a swig from the bottle. ‘Too fucking right.'

Carina had followed the conversation with a listless lack of interest, leaning against the wall by the entrance to the subway. Then something happened. She suddenly had goose bumps on her arms, and a shudder ran down her spine as if an icy blast had come rushing up from the underworld. She didn't have time to reflect on this, because two men emerged from the subway. They were both wearing suits, and they both had coal-black hair.

‘What are you doing?' one of them said, with a noticeable accent. His companion gestured to him to be quiet as all three boys turned to face them.

‘What's this I hear?' said Hasse, the heaviest and strongest of the three. ‘Doesn't sound much like Swedish to me.'

‘Nothing,' the other man said. ‘We go here now.' His Swedish was worse than the first man's.

‘So you like Palme, do you?' Micke said, taking a couple of steps towards the men with the other boys following in his wake.

What happened next could hardly be described as a fight. The submissive man was quickly knocked to the ground, where he stayed. When his rebellious companion rushed at Micke, Carina stuck out her foot and tripped him up, so that he went down headfirst.

It was instinctive. Her foot shot out before she had time to think. As soon as she made contact with his leg she regretted her action, and backed away towards the Brunkeberg tunnel. Cold darkness licked at her spine, making her shiver and shake.

A spasm in the leg, an outstretched foot, a small movement that would never let go of Carina because of the subsequent course of events. The boys dragged the man over to the memorial plaque, where Micke grabbed him by the hair and held his face just above the metal.

‘So you like Palme, do you? Okay, well give him a kiss then!'

He slammed the man's face against the plaque. Pulled it up, slammed it down. The third time something shattered. Teeth, nose, possibly both.

‘Kiss the piss!' Micke yelled. ‘Kiss Palme!'

He slammed down the man's face yet again, blood pouring over the metal and mingling with Jannika's urine. The others had moved back a little way, and Johan said: ‘For fuck's sake, Micke, that's enough.'

Carina was still edging backwards towards the tunnel; she covered her mouth with her hands as Micke repeated his mantra—‘Kiss the piss! Kiss Palme!'—and continued to mash the man's face.

It's here.

She had no idea what the thought meant; it was a message from the same deep recess of the human psyche as the fear of fire, heights, sharks, everything that can kill us. Like the cold darkness a moment ago, it licked at her back, just as diffuse as smoke or mist. And just as concrete. Slowly she turned around.

The summer evening was still light, and she had no difficulty in making out the lump of darkness lying outside the entrance to the tunnel. As she looked at it, it stopped being a lump; it stood up on four legs and took the shape of a tiger. A black tiger.

It padded softly towards her, and she was so paralysed with fear that she couldn't move a muscle. The tiger had no stripes; it was entirely black apart from the eyes, which caught something of the light from the sky. They shone as they stared past Carina towards the
violent attack, which judging by the noise was still going on. The tiger drew back its lips and bared its teeth, emitting a low-pitched sound that was more of a purr than a growl.

The tiger stopped five metres away from her, pricked up its ears and looked up towards the hill on Luntmakargatan. With a supreme effort of will, as if she were freeing herself from a collar of ice, Carina turned her head to see what the tiger was looking at. Two seconds later a police car rounded the corner and drove down the hill. It turned left when it reached Carina, heading towards Sveavägen.

Only then did she make the connection. Violent attack—police. When she looked back at the tunnel she saw the tiger running up the steps towards Malmskillnadsgatan. She didn't see whether it carried on up the steps or disappeared on the way, because she had regained her ability to think, to a certain extent at least, and she spun around just as the police car screeched to a halt and three cops jumped out.

She didn't stop to see what happened to the rest of the gang, or to give the police time to wonder about the girl they had driven past. She took to her heels as if the tiger was after her and ran along Luntmakargatan in the direction of Tegnérgatan.

She had gone no more than twenty metres when she was struck by that very fear: what if the tiger was after her? She glanced back, but the street was empty. And yet it felt as if the tiger was there. As if it would always be there. She ran…

*

…and she had carried on running, until she crashed into Stefan's arms a few years later. Or rather crawled into them. That's another story. But even when her life had stabilised and her focus had shifted from the abyss to an ICA store in the country, she had never stopped looking over her shoulder.

As time went by, the memory of the tiger had grown diffuse, and she would happily have dismissed it as a hallucination if the feeling hadn't stayed with her. It was no longer panting at her heels, but it
was lurking somewhere behind her, waiting for the right moment to pounce.

And now it is here. Carina stops moving backwards, stops screaming as the tiger turns around and begins to walk away from her, but she doesn't take her eyes off it until it is so far away that it could be something else. Something normal.

Her body has been so tense for such a long time that it hurts when she relaxes. The left side of her head is aching, and she has to make an effort to remember why.