She rang Göran on her mobile and asked him to come and pick her up. Then she went and sat on the pavement and waited for him, staring down through the grating over a drain. Behind her the party went on.
Somewhere there has to be rock bottom, a limit to how far a person can fall. It is possible that Teresa had reached this point when she woke up at half past eight on Saturday morning. She started the day by going to the toilet and spewing up everything that hadn’t already come up. Then she lay in her bed with her arms around her belly and just wanted to die. Really die. Be obliterated, not exist any more, not take one more step in this world.
She had thought it was unnecessary to remove all sharp objects from her room; her problems had never had anything to do with taking her own life. Now her thoughts were focused on nothing else. She lay there wondering whether she had the strength or the courage to sharpen a pencil and hold it upright on the desk in her clenched fist, then slam her head down onto the point so that it penetrated her eye and went into her brain.
No. It was too gruesome, and there wasn’t even any guarantee that she would die. But she wanted to die. Her memories of the previous evening were blurred and disjointed, but she remembered the most important bits, which made her want to fill her mouth with earth, cover her body with earth.
The bottle of Fontex tablets was on her bedside table. She knew they weren’t an option, that they wouldn’t work. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been allowed to have them there. Out of habit she reached for the bottle to take her morning tablet, but let her hand drop.
If she stopped taking her tablets, perhaps she really would become mentally ill. Perhaps they would come and take her away. Lock her up. It was an alternative to dying, and almost the same thing. Only the earth in the mouth was missing, but you could always eat that anyway.
That was the way her thoughts went on Saturday morning.
When she got up to go to the toilet again, Maria was sitting in the armchair on the landing, knitting. She never usually sat there. She was keeping watch.
‘Hi,’ said Teresa.
‘Hi. Have you taken your tablet?’
‘Mm.’
Sitting on the toilet, she made her decision. She really would stop taking her tablets, she would see if she went crazy. Give it a month. If that didn’t work she would come up with a way of killing herself that didn’t feel too horrible. Her hope was that she would go mad without actually noticing.
Just after twelve she went downstairs to keep up appearances. She ate a bread roll with cheese; it tasted like ash. The radio was on in Olof’s room because he was listening to Tracks. As the song that was bubbling under this week was introduced, Teresa stopped in mid-bite to listen to Kaj Kindvalclass="underline" ‘A studio version of a track that’s already had considerable success on MySpace and YouTube has now been released. The artist calls herself Tesla, and apart from a couple of appearances and an early exit from the latest series of Idol, we don’t know too much about her. Perhaps that will all change now. This is “Fly”.’
The song began, and Teresa resumed her chewing. They had added strings and made the song more showy. It no longer had anything to do with her. She finished her sandwich and had a glass of milk. Then she felt sick and had to go and throw up again.
At three o’clock her mobile beeped to tell her that she had a message. It said, ‘Film of the year! Check this out!’ A film clip was attached.
Since she already had her face pressed firmly to the ground, she had a look. The picture quality was surprisingly good. Karl-Axel’s father had an excellent job. He gave his son excellent presents. For example an excellent mobile with excellent definition and excellent video and sound recording. The film might even have been even more excellent and more detailed than Teresa’s crappy mobile was capable of showing.
They had been standing there right from the start, and they had filmed the whole thing, right from Teresa’s, ‘Micke. You’re so bloody nice. So kind.’ Teresa saw and understood. No shadow would fall over Micke. He was a boy, and she had practically attacked him. Forced herself on him, then thrown up all over him.
She knew how it worked. The film would spread. Right across the world. In a couple of days people in Buenos Aires would be sitting laughing at the most disgusting thing they had ever seen, then they would send it on to their friends. She couldn’t quite take it in.
Teresa sat down at her desk; her hands were ice-cold. Her mobile rang. She automatically pressed the reply button and put it to her ear.
‘Yes?’
‘Teresa? Hi, it’s Johannes.’
‘Hi, Johannes.’
There was silence at the other end. Then Johannes sighed, making a crackling sound in her ear. ‘How are you feeling?’
Teresa didn’t reply. There was no simple answer to that question.
‘I saw the film,’ said Johannes. ‘Well, not all of it, but…I just wanted to…I feel really sorry for you.’
‘Don’t.’
‘But I do. It’s not right. You’ve had such a…I just wanted to say that…I’m here. Just so you know.’
‘How are things with Agnes?’
‘What? Oh, fine. And she says the same.’
‘Are you back together?’
‘Yes. But Teresa, try to…try…Oh, I don’t know. But I’m here, OK? And Agnes. And we’re very fond of you.’
‘I know you’re not. But thanks anyway. It was kind of you.’
Teresa rang off. When the phone rang again she rejected the call. She lay down on her bed and stared up at the ceiling.
Something gets dirty. A towel. Then it gets dirtier. And even dirtier, so dirty that it begins to fall apart. It is trampled in the mud, picked up, rolled into a ball. There is a breaking point in the state of dirtiness where the object that is dirty ceases to be itself. It becomes something else. The towel no longer looks like a towel, it cannot be used as a towel, it is not a towel. The same thing applies to a human being. Oh, the capacity for reflection might get in the way, the capacity to miss what that person once was. Human, detergent-scented, usable.
But it disappears, very gradually. It disappears.
During the afternoon and evening she received a number of suggestive or downright unpleasant text messages which she saved after reading them. The telephone rang twice; the first time it was somebody making slurping noises, the second time somebody whispering, ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop.’
When Teresa went to bed, she was incapable of sleeping. She tried reading some Ekelöf, but couldn’t concentrate for more than two lines at a time.
She re-read the disgusting texts: have a nice weekend slag; suck and swallow; World Championship in cock sucking and spewing, along with those who had made a little more effort.
She couldn’t get enough. It was two o’clock in the morning when she sat down at the computer to see if she had received any emails. She had. More of the same from unfamiliar addresses; the little film had already spread far and wide, and had fired certain people’s imagination and limited ability to articulate their thoughts.
There were several messages from Theres as well, spread over the past few weeks. When she opened one of them she almost expected it to contain some variation on the cock/suck/spew theme.
‘you must come here you have to be here’ one of them said. In another, older message, ‘why did you run away tell me why you didn’t stay’. The oldest, apart from the one she had deleted, said, ‘jerry says you misunderstood i don’t understand how you misunderstood you have to tell me’. The most recent message had arrived on Friday evening while Teresa was at the party, ‘you have to write i don’t like it when you’re gone’.
Teresa copied the phrases from fourteen messages in total and pasted them in chronological order into one single document, which she read over and over again. If she had still had the ability to cry, she would have done so. Instead of tears a couple of phrases by Ekelöf welled up and forced their way out.