‘Every single one,’ says Christer Hermansson and twitches his head a couple of degrees backwards and upwards. He blinks slightly nervously.
‘To whom?’ Titus hisses.
‘We can’t, of course, say that. We are very strict about library confidentiality.’
‘What damned library confidentiality?’ Titus shouts. ‘Just tell me who has borrowed my books!’
‘Now, shall we calm down a little? To start with, they are not your books. They are the library’s books. We stock them in order to lend them to the public. And now they have been borrowed. By a member of the public. Or several. The books you have asked for are in fact very popular. That’s how it is.’
Curses! Titus realises that it is Eddie X of course who has borrowed the books. It isn’t enough that he has stolen Titus’ basic idea of writing The Best Book in the World. He has also pinched Titus’ working method!
Another piece drops into place. The student with the same hairdo as Eddie X, up there in the reading room that he went past just a few minutes ago, is of course not a student. It is Eddie X! He’s sitting here, in the middle of Stockholm, at the City Library, and writing my book!
Titus rushes down the stairs and off down the corridor that leads to the lecture halls and the reading rooms. Which one was it? He tears open door after door. Empty. Nobody there. No Eddie, anyway. Has he imagined it all? When he reaches the last door, he stops and catches his breath for a moment. What shall he actually say to Eddie?
He grabs the doorknob. Locked! He knocks on the door. No answer. He knocks harder and puts his mouth against the keyhole.
‘Hello, is somebody in there?’
Not a sound. He bangs the underside of his fist against the door. Hard, time after time.
‘Hello!’
Suddenly he hears the sound of a chair being moved across the floor. Somebody’s there!
‘Open the door!’
‘Hello?’ says a weak voice from inside. ‘Yes, what do you want?’
‘Open the door, I want to talk to you!’
There is silence for a few moments. Then the key is turned on the inside. The door is slowly pushed ajar. Eddie’s brown teddy-bear eyes peep out through the chink. Titus tries to push the door further open, but Eddie has evidently put something against it. It won’t give an inch. Eddie breaks into a smile inside the little opening.
‘Hi, Titus! Great to see you!’
‘What are you doing, Eddie? What on earth are you doing?’
‘Haha,’ Eddie gives a friendly laugh. ‘Are you working for the police now, what’s got into you? You look stressed, Titus. You must take more care of yourself.’
Always this pleasant tone. It really gets on Titus’ nerves. Can’t you even get into a raging fury without that damn love poet starting to behave like a saint? But Eddie’s calm does its work. It always does, for everything and on everybody. Even on Titus – his pulse slows down a little.
‘Yes, well, I walked past here earlier. And then, after a long while, something clicked inside my head. It must have been Eddie sitting in there, I thought. So I went back, but then the door was locked.’
‘Oh, right, good thing you came back. It is really great to see you again!’
‘Er, yeah, same here…’
‘Are you here to borrow books?’
‘Yeah, right. That was the idea.’
‘Anything particular you’re looking for?’
‘No, not really, just scouting round a little…’
How do some people always have the ability to steer a conversation in the direction they want? Sometimes it doesn’t seem to make any difference however strong your intentions are. Sometimes there is a cat in hell’s chance of getting your way. Titus feels that the situation is running through his fingers. How can he confront Eddie with what he knows? Er… knows? He doesn’t actually know anything. He hasn’t really got a clue as to what Eddie is doing. Perhaps the whole thing is just a figment of Titus’ imagination. A phantom image of a horrible crime that says ‘pop’ and goes up in smoke as soon as you turn the light on.
But nevertheless. No smoke without fire.
Damn it, I’m stone-cold sober and 100 per cent compos mentis, Titus thinks. Of course I must be able to rely on my intuition!
‘And you, Eddie, what are you doing?’
Eddie brushes away a blue lock of hair from his eyes and loosens his colourful silk scarf, which is wrapped several times around his neck. A very solemn look spreads across his face.
‘I’m writing.’
‘Oh, yeah…?’ says Titus, and wants to hear more.
‘I’m writing something I am forced to write.’
‘Umm… I can believe that,’ Titus mumbles to himself and sees that a confession is close. He knows Eddie and realises that he isn’t bad deep inside. The guy can’t keep a secret. If he is writing The Best Book in the World, he’s going to say so.
‘Yeah, well, I have been prowling around this project and not been able to take the plunge. I can’t wait any longer.’
‘No?’
‘It’s about my dad.’
‘What? Your dad?’
‘Yes, I’m trying to find out what actually happened when I was a child. You know, Titus, I regard myself as a fairly happy person. Yet there is an unpleasant darkness somewhere which sometimes drags me down. I suspect that it is my childhood that is behind it all.’
‘So now you’re going to write a book about your dad?’
‘No, no, I’m working on my summer programme. On the radio, you know. They’re broadcasting it next week, there’ll be millions of listeners. I’ve had to rethink it completely; at first I’d planned to do a programme of reminiscences interwoven with my favourite music, from when I was little up to the present day. A delightful document of the times, with lots of nostalgic touchdowns. First time I made out, the first festival, stuff like that. But then I got hooked on a Peter LeMarc song that I heard him play live long before his stage fright got the upper hand. Blue Light. Have you heard it?’
‘I don’t know…’
‘It goes something like this: “I was born under a blue light. Grew up in a blue house. Lived in a blue binge. But now I realise that there is another Sweden. I have seen that there are other colours.”’
‘Yeah, right, I think I’ve heard that.’
‘I started thinking about what the lyrics could mean to me. And then it struck me. I too grew up in a blue house. Metaphorically speaking. My dad was a nutter.’
‘A nutter?’
‘A paranoid schizophrenic,’ says Eddie. ‘He suffered from severe delusions and was often deeply depressed. He got the idea that evil people climbed into his soul and stole his goodness.’
‘Oh dear,’ says Titus. He can’t help wondering how he got here, in a heart-to-heart conversation about Eddie’s dad through a chink in the door at the City Library.
‘Sad pictures pop up out of my memory. But I don’t want to apportion guilt. I simply must find out more. So I have borrowed loads of books about this, other people’s stories about what it is like to live close to a mental illness. I have been forced to re-do the whole programme. There won’t be any laughing and kidding. I am going to turn my heart inside out instead. It will be a one-and-a-half-hour blue summer.’
Titus breathes out. In a sense, it is a relief to hear that Eddie had a rotten childhood. It means that he won’t have time to think about The Best Book in the World. I hope he’ll dig really deep into the shit, Titus thinks maliciously. After the light comes darkness. Eddie is on his way into a tunnel. Hope it will be long and narrow. Now I am the one who sees the light!
But, in that case, who the hell has borrowed all the books? Is there another rival? Or is it all just another figment of his imagination?