Diary of a Murderer, November 2006, Monday

I never imagined that it would be so simple! You just step into people’s lives for a few minutes and then out again. As if nothing has happened. Easy as pie. That’s the advantage of being an invisible person like me. It’s true you don’t get noticed when you want to, but when you don’t want to be noticed, it’s excellent.

I’m one of the invisible people. The invisible people who cower through life, regardless of weather and business cycles. For us it’s always a recession, always fog. We always cower for fear of a fist in the face or a kick in the guts. For no good reason – nobody sees us anyway.

Nobody looks at me and thinks, ‘Nice hairdo. I think I’ll get my hair cut that way too.’ Nobody looks at me and thinks, ‘Yuck, what a terrible jacket! That’s been out of style for years!’ Nobody looks at me at all. Not if I’m standing in the way, not if I’m holding open the door, not if I offer someone my seat on the metro, and not if I don’t. Not any more. I was visible as a child. To children. Not to grown-ups. It was as if, as a child, I carried a big, yellow sign that said, ‘Look at me! I’m ugly and ridiculous! I wear strange clothes and say weird things! Hit me, mock me! Do it, do it – hurt me! Beat the abnormality out of me so I can become a normal person!’ But they didn’t succeed. ’Cause I became a grown-up, but not normal.

Nobody saw me when I bought the train ticket to Katrineholm. Nobody saw me as I looked out of the window at the landscape of my childhood. The oak hills and lakes of Södermanland, enchanted forests and pastures.

I take the short cut to my childhood street – and Lise-Lott’s. From the train station I simply follow Storgatan for a while, which then turns into Stockholmsvägen. Take a left towards East School and you’re there. She still lives here, after all these years, in this godforsaken place. If I’d stayed here I would have been dead a long time ago. But I’m alive and it’s Lise-Lott who’s dead.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m walking between the apartment buildings, into the courtyard. Same courtyard, new equipment for the children. A few kids are playing in the sandpit and their mothers are sitting on a bench watching, otherwise the courtyard is deserted. The bushes with the big white berries that pop when you step on them are still there alongside the buildings. The bushes were so big you could walk around inside them, play hide-and-seek and make forts. Now they look rather unassuming.

That was where Lise-Lott and a few others – her sister and friends from the estate – tore off all my clothes and smeared mud all over me. They hung my clothes over the climbing frame and when the game was over I had to choose between going naked out on to the courtyard and taking down the clothes, in full view of everyone, or sneaking into the basement. I chose the latter, and when the children scattered and I dared go back to the courtyard to fetch my clothes, they were gone. The kids and the clothes.

The climbing frame. It’s been replaced by a new, more modern version, with a climbing wall and ropes and a built-in slide. You could crawl inside the old one – a big sphere of air encased by red steel bars – and climb up and hang by your knees. I spent an afternoon there, tormented by Lise-Lott and her like-minded gang. I sat on the top, my legs dangling, sweaty with the fear of what would happen if I came down. They threw clods of dirt at me, and snowballs. A few times they tried to drag me down by pulling on my feet, but I held on for dear life. They screamed at me and insulted me – shouted how ugly and stupid I was – and sometimes they retreated a little, to lure me into venturing down. When I did, they came rushing back again. The whole thing ended when Lise-Lott packed some pieces of glass into a snowball and threw it at me. One piece cut a deep gash in my neck, the pain caused me to release my desperate hold and I fell to the ground. I got a concussion in the process. I vomited, to the children’s delight, but when they saw the blood they ran away. I staggered home, had to go to the hospital and get stitches, and then stay in bed for a few days. One good thing came out of it anyway.

Lise-Lott’s dad locked me in the basement once, because I told Lise-Lott that my dad was a cop, which, of course, was something I had made up. True, Lise-Lott’s dad wasn’t a cop either, although she said he was on a daily basis – so you wouldn’t dare talk back, I guess – but he clearly had the authority to lock people up anyway. If I remember rightly, he worked as an assistant at Karsudden, a mental hospital for criminals. Of course, he must have learned that trick there. It worked: I never lied about my dad again, but Lise-Lott carried on as usual. At home it was not considered a good idea to lock people in the basement, so we never tried it on Lise-Lott, despite dogged attempts at persuasion on my part.

After pondering my miserable childhood for a while, I make my way via the basement into Lise-Lott’s current building. In the stairwell I run into her mum, who is on her way out of the apartment. So Lise-Lott is at home and I can both see and hear that the door is unlocked, which makes the whole thing even simpler. The mother is her usual self. She’s put on a bit of weight, but she has the same matronly perm, the same ruminating chewing gum, and the same surly, arrogant expression. Of course she doesn’t see me, even though we brush against each other in passing. I hear muted TV voices from inside the apartment before the door closes. Then I know where to find her.

I go up a few more flights and wait for several minutes by a window that faces on to the street. The outside door slams shut and someone comes running up the stairs. The postman rushes by, taking no notice of the insignificant figure he passes, and then he’s back again, on his way down through the building with the mail. He takes no notice of me this time either.

When he is gone I go down to Lise-Lott’s apartment, carefully open the door, sneak into the dark hallway, soundlessly close the door behind me and lock it.

She is sitting taking a footbath with a cigarette in her hand, while some idiotic soap opera plays out on the TV in front of her. I think that reality often surpasses fiction, and then I step out into the light. She does not even look surprised, but instead just gives me a dull, furtive look and asks what this is about. I tell her what this is about, while her gaze wanders between me and the TV with no noticeable reaction.

‘I have no memory of that,’ she says simply, taking a few deep puffs on her cigarette before she returns to her TV-watching.

I take a few steps forward and grab hold of her neck with one hand.

‘Try to remember then,’ I say threateningly, but she only stares at me in surprise.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she says calmly. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Maybe,’ I answer.

‘Let go of me!’ she says angrily.

‘Then remember,’ I say, pressing my fingers hard against her neck. ‘Remember what you did to my neck.’

I try to get her to remember. I tell her, but she just stares back stupidly. Then I throw her down on to the floor in a kneeling position – keeping a firm grip on her neck – and force her head into the basin of water. I hold her under the water’s surface for a little while and she flails her arms and legs, without letting go of the cigarette between her index and middle finger. When I finally let her up again, she’s livened up. She snorts and blinks to get the water out of her eyes and to see me clearly.

‘What do you want from me?’ she moans at last, when her breathing has recovered enough.

‘I want you to remember,’ I say, still grasping her neck. ‘Remember, understand and ask for forgiveness.’

‘But I don’t remember! I can’t help –’

‘You have to remember,’ I interrupt. ‘You have to remember how you tortured me for days on end. You have to understand that you can’t abuse a person the way you and your friends did, without leaving marks. Lasting impressions, incurable wounds. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you understand that it could be your child lying out there in the mud, with a beaten-up face and their clothes in rags? How would that feel?’

‘That … that would feel horrible,’ she whimpers, and tears well up in her eyes, run down and mix with the streams of water on her cheeks.

‘So why did you do it?’

‘I don’t even know if I did!’ she cries desperately. ‘We were just kids, I can’t believe …’

I am getting tired of her talk and her bad memory, so I press her down under the water again – for longer this time. I see the cigarette burning down to her fingers, and she finally lets it go when it burns her. When I decide to let her up again, she is completely done in and can no longer hold herself up, so I have to release my grip on her neck and lift her head by the hair. I throw her head back and forth and she coughs and puffs for several minutes, not able to get a word out. During that time I tell her about crushed dreams, about a childhood without sunlight, about a life in loneliness, about a naked, withered soul. When she regains her ability to speak, she hisses out, ‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t believe her, but that doesn’t matter; she’s going to die anyway.

‘Your suffering is too short,’ I say. ‘Mine has lasted for thirty-eight years. But my arms are getting tired. Bye-bye, Lise-Lott.’

I press her head down into the footbath for the last time, but she has already given up. She struggles involuntarily a little and then she is quiet. I leave her where she is, on her knees, bent over the basin, but I can’t resist putting the burned-out cigarette back between her fingers before I get up.

On the TV they are arguing and someone rushes out of a room and slams the door. I leave calmly and carefully close the door on Lise-Lott.