She was going to visit a friend. A girl. In Stockholm. Yes, she was absolutely sure it wasn’t some dirty old man. They had met on the net and now they wanted to meet IRL. In real life. Yes, she would come home the same night and yes, she had checked on Google maps and knew exactly where she was going and how to get there. Svedmyra.
She didn’t want to tell them it was the same girl they had all seen on Idol. Perhaps because they would think she was lying, perhaps they wouldn’t believe her. Perhaps because she would be revealing something she wanted to keep secret.
Her parents knew how lonely she was, and presumably that was why they agreed. She gave them Theres’ address and telephone number and promised to ring when she got there.
So far so good.
It was when she got round to trying to pack a bag that the whole thing ground to a halt. She had never travelled alone on the train before. You were supposed to have a bag when you were travelling, weren’t you? But what was she supposed to put in it? What did she need?
Who am I?
That was another way of putting it. What did she want to take with her to Theres, what did she want to show, who did she want to be? She sat on her bed, staring at the empty bag, and she thought it was mocking her. The bag was her. Empty. Nothing. She had nothing to bring.
She went into the bathroom, did her best with some make-up and thought the result looked OK. She had learned to apply blusher so that her face looked less chubby from certain angles. She fluffed up her hair with a little mousse to create some air around her forehead. Kohl, eye shadow.
When she had finished Göran shouted from downstairs that they would have to go if they were going to catch the train. Without thinking, Teresa chucked in her map, her mobile and her MP3 player, her notebook and her black velour tracksuit. The tracksuit went in mostly because she needed something to fill up the bag.
On the way to the station, Göran asked more questions about the girl she was going to see, and Teresa told him the truth: that they had met on a forum about wolves, that they were the same age, and that she lived in Svedmyra. She lied or stretched the truth when it came to everything else.
Göran waited until the train came in, then gave Teresa a hug which she couldn’t bring herself to return. When she was settled and the train was starting to pull out, Göran waved. She waved back without enthusiasm, and saw him turn away and head back to the car.
It only took a couple of minutes for the journey to sink its claws into her. She was travelling. She was sitting alone on a train going somewhere she had never been before. Between two points she was a passenger, a person who was on their way. A person who was free. She caught sight of her reflection in the window, and didn’t recognise herself.
Who’s that sitting there? Who can it be?
She took out her notebook and a pen, then sat there sucking the pen and occasionally glancing at herself in the glass. She would have loved to be the exciting stranger, sitting on the train and writing, but nothing came to her. Not a word. Her imagination had always been feeble, and now it had fainted dead away.
She wrote, ‘I am sitting on a train…’ but that was it. She wrote it again. And again. When she had been sitting there for ten minutes and filled two pages with the same six words, she looked at herself. The stranger.
Enough!
She shoved the notebook back in her bag and went to the toilet. She leaned against the washbasin for a long time, examining herself in the mirror. Then she wet her face, squirted liquid soap in her hands and washed herself thoroughly, scrubbing off every scrap of make-up. Then she wet her hair to flatten it down at the front, and dried herself with paper towels until her hair lay flat and shapeless.
She got undressed, pulled the black sweatshirt and the black velour tracksuit bottoms out of her bag and put them on. When she looked at the result in the mirror she was able to confirm that she looked bloody awful.
This is me.
When she sat down again the face looking back at her from the other side of the glass was familiar. That ugly cow had been right there with her all through her life, and now she was coming with her to Stockholm. Teresa opened her notebook and wrote:
Those who have wings fly
Those who have teeth bite
You have wings you have teeth
Make sure something happens
Use your hands, grip!
Use your teeth, bite!
Use your wings, fly!
Fly, fly, fly high one day
Fly high for fuck’s sake
The streams of people at T-Centralen, the central subway station, terrified her. As she was going down the stairs from the platform she literally felt as if the waters were closing over her head. That she had a river in front of her, and she was at risk of drowning. Because she didn’t even know which direction she was supposed to go in, she stepped into the river and allowed herself to be swept along until she reached the barriers leading to the tracks.
She handed over some money at a window and said, ‘Svedmyra.’ She was given three coupons and she asked where she should go, then she joined a new stream. She clung to her bag, feeling anxious all the time. There were too many people and she was too alone and too small.
Things were a bit better once she had boarded the train, checked that it was going to Svedmyra and found an empty seat. She could settle down, she had her place. But there were still too many people. Mostly adults with expressionless faces, surrounding her on all sides. At any moment an arm might reach out or someone might start talking to her, wanting something from her.
People kept trooping on and off, and by the time they reached Svedmyra the carriage was almost empty. Teresa stepped onto the platform and unfolded her map. She had made a cross by Theres’ address, just like a treasure map.
There was a light covering of snow on the street, and she shivered in her thin sweatshirt. She pretended that she was a black hole: she wasn’t actually moving-instead, the building where Theres lived was being drawn towards her, about to be sucked into her.
She found the right street and the right door was brought towards her. She kept the game going until she was standing in the lift pressing the button for the top floor, and then she had to stop. She suddenly felt nervous, and only her chilled skin stopped her from breaking out in a sweat.
Fly high for fuck’s sake…
The lift carried her upwards.
It said ‘Cederström’ on the door, as Theres had told her it would. Teresa rang the bell and tried to arrange her face in a suitable expression, but couldn’t come up with one and decided not to bother.
She didn’t know what she had expected. Theres had written that she lived with ‘Jerry’, but hadn’t explained who this Jerry was. The man who opened the door looked like the men who usually sat on the benches in the park, apart from the fact that the check shirt he was wearing looked brand new.
‘Hi,’ said Teresa. ‘Does Theres live here?’
The man looked her up and down and glanced out onto the landing. Then he stepped to one side and said, ‘Come in. You look cold.’
‘I’ve got a jacket.’
‘Right. You could have fooled me.’ He gestured towards the interior of the apartment. ‘She’s in there.’
Teresa took off her shoes and walked through the hallway, keeping a firm grip on the strap of her bag. There was still a risk that the whole thing was a con. That the man who answered the door had sent the emails, and that something terrible would happen to her at any minute. She’d heard about that kind of thing.
When there was no one in the living room her heart started pounding. She listened, waiting for the bang as the front door slammed shut. It didn’t come. The door to another room was open, and she saw Theres, sitting on a bed with her hands resting on her lap.