Johannes nodded without making any suggestions, so Teresa went on, ‘So what shall we do, then? What do you usually do?’
Johannes shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not much.’
‘Do you like board games?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you play Chinese checkers?’
‘Yes. I’m really good at it.’
‘How good?’
‘I usually win.’
‘So do I. When I play my dad.’
‘I usually win when I play my mum.’
Teresa went inside and fetched the game. When she came back Johannes had crawled into the cave and was sitting there waiting for her. She didn’t like him sitting there. That was her place. But she remembered her father saying that those rocks were actually on the neighbour’s property, just as Johannes had said. So she couldn’t really chuck him out. But she could move him.
‘That’s my place,’ she said.
‘So where shall I sit?’
Teresa pointed to the back wall of the cave. ‘There.’
When Johannes got up, Teresa saw that he had been sitting on her pile of leaves. He scooped them up in his arms and tipped them out in his designated place, then gathered them together and patted them down before sitting on them. Teresa was still annoyed with him for moving into her cave, so to tease him she said, ‘Are you frightened of getting your trousers dirty?’
‘Yes.’
The direct answer disarmed her and she couldn’t come up with anything else to say, so she put the board on the ground and sat down opposite Johannes. In silence they picked up the plastic counters and placed them on their spots. Then Johannes said, ‘You can start because you’re the smallest.’
A wave of heat spread over the tips of Teresa’s ears, and she snapped, ‘You can start because it’s my game.’
Johannes shook his head. ‘You can start because you’re a girl.’
Teresa’s ears were positively on fire by now, and she was on the point of getting up and walking out. But then she would have to leave the game behind, so instead she said, ‘You can start because you’re much more stupid than me!’
Johannes looked at her open-mouthed. Then he did something unexpected. He started to giggle. Teresa glared at him. Johannes giggled for a while, then he became totally serious and made his first move. She couldn’t work him out.
Johannes won the first game and Teresa agreed to start the next game, since he had started last time because he was more stupid than her. She lost again. Johannes played in a strange way, as if he were thinking everything out well in advance.
She didn’t really want to play any more, but Johannes said, ‘Just one more time, winner takes all.’
They played one more game and Teresa won, but she had the distinct feeling that Johannes had lost on purpose. It was getting dark, and Teresa gathered up the game. She said, ‘Bye then,’ and left Johannes sitting in the cave.
A few weeks later they were inseparable, and who would have expected anything else? Johannes was a strange boy, but Teresa was old enough to see herself from the outside, and realised she was pretty strange too. She tried to fit in with her classmates as best she could, but it never really worked.
She wasn’t bullied, she wasn’t exactly excluded, but she wasn’t part of it all. She wasn’t there. She knew all the skipping games as well as anyone else and had the courage to swing higher than any girl in her class, but it was all the talk in between. The chatter, the gestures. She just couldn’t do it, and became stiff and odd when she tried to imitate the others. So she gave up.
The only person in the class who actively sought her out was Mimmi, but she wore secondhand clothes and didn’t wash her hair and wasn’t all there, because her mother was a junkie. Teresa rebuffed her kindly. When that didn’t work, she rebuffed her somewhat less kindly.
Johannes was odd in a more normal way. It was as if he had a shell of bad oddness, but if you just scraped away a little bit, a better kind of oddness emerged. Teresa knew he attended the Waldorf school in Rimsta, and that was all she knew. They never talked about school. Jennifer in Teresa’s class said the Waldorf kids were crazy and just made stuff out of clay.
Like Teresa, Johannes liked learning things. He read a lot of books, mostly about war and birds. Sometimes they would talk about something, wonder about something, and the next day Johannes would have looked it up and come back with the answer, telling her for example that only certain female ants became queens, most were soldiers or workers.
They often hung out among the trees and made up various games and competitions. Who could throw pine cones most accurately (Johannes), who could run fastest (Teresa), or who could name the most animals starting with the same letter (usually Johannes). What they didn’t do was play games involving imagination, or anything that might dirty Johannes’ clothes. This meant they spent quite a lot of time talking instead.
Once when Johannes didn’t turn up as usual in the afternoon, Teresa went to his house and rang the doorbell. His mother opened the door. She was small and slender and looked scared. Her eyes were enormous, and twitched as if she wanted to blink but couldn’t. When Teresa asked about Johannes, his mother said he would probably be home any minute-would she like to come in and wait?
No, she wouldn’t. She could see through the doorway that it was dark inside, and it smelled extremely clean. This was such a contrast with her own house that it felt uncomfortable. She went and sat on the garden wall instead.
After no more than ten minutes a black, shiny car turned into the drive. It made almost no sound. The car stopped a few metres from Teresa, the driver’s door opened and a man wearing a suit and tie stepped out. He was short but broad-shouldered, and looked like a cartoon character. His face was so clean and clear that it could have been a drawing.
The man smiled at Teresa, showing his white teeth. Even his smile looked as if it had been drawn. He said, ‘Would you mind not sitting on the wall, please?’ and Teresa jumped down at once. The man took a few steps towards her, held out his hand and said, ‘And you are…?’
Teresa took his hand, which was warm and dry, said, ‘Teresa,’ and before she even realised how it had happened she had bobbed a curtsey, something she never normally did. Her knees just bent by themselves. The man held onto her hand and said, ‘You’re a friend of Johannes, I gather?’
Teresa stole a glance at Johannes, who had got out of the car and was standing by the bonnet looking slightly wary. She nodded. The man let go of her hand and said, ‘Well, in that case I’d better not hold you up. Off you go and play.’
The man turned and walked towards the house, while Teresa and Johannes stood motionless, as if they had been turned to stone. It was only when the front door had closed that Johannes left his place by the bonnet and came over.
‘My father,’ he said in an apologetic tone of voice. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for you.’
‘Did you ring the doorbell?’
‘Yes.’
Johannes looked over towards the house and pulled a face. ‘You shouldn’t do that, my mother gets so…don’t do it again.’
‘No. I won’t.’
Johannes hunched his shoulders and gave a long sigh, something he did from time to time that made him seem several years older. Then he said, ‘Shall we do something?’
Something had happened that made Teresa able to say what she said next. It was cold outside and therefore it was a perfectly natural thing to say, it was just that she’d never said it before. She said, ‘We could go back to my house.’
Over the winter they met up mostly at Teresa’s house when they weren’t outdoors. Arvid and Olof teased her at first and said, ‘Kissy kissy’ and ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ but soon gave up when neither Teresa nor Johannes took any notice.