The Boy at the Door Read online

  Yesterday Roy gave me more than usual and at first I thought it was because it’s my birthday today and he was being nice, but then I remembered I hadn’t told him that. Either way, it was a nice surprise, though it’s not like I didn’t have to work for it. But this is a good set-up, and most people I know would kill to have someone like Sylvia and Roy. I got meth, too, which I don’t always, so everything is nice and smooth inside of me today. Glass, which is what Roy always calls it, is good like that – it gives you a good six hours of just... easy happy. I’ve already been into town; I took the bus and walked around like other girls my age, in and out of a couple of shops, but in H&M, where I wanted to buy a sweater I’d seen in the window, the security men came and told me to go away. I opened my handbag and showed the bundles of two-hundred-kroner bills to them but they still didn’t let me come in, they just looked away like I wasn’t even there, and pointed to the door. I ended up buying a stupid plain black sweater in another shop instead, because at least I was allowed in there, though the shop assistant clutched a phone to her ear the whole time, preparing herself to be threatened with a dirty needle and told to open the cash register.

  When I came back, Sylvia said I could finish off the pizza I’d made for her lunch, and then I helped her into her bedroom like I do most afternoons.

  ‘I had a strange customer today,’ she said. ‘A Hungarian woman in her eighties who wanted me to find out whether she’d live long enough for there to be any point in buying a time-share flat in Tenerife. I told her to spend her money on champagne and handbags instead.’ Sylvia laughed so hard she began coughing, and she was still wheezing when I left the room and came back to my garage.

  It’s only seven and there isn’t anything for me to do except write – Roy left this morning for Portugal and won’t be back for over a week. Maybe Oliver down the road will come and smoke with me, but when he realizes how much I’ve done, he’ll go away again because he likes it more when I haven’t used, even though I’m hardly a charmer then, either. He sometimes tells me that it doesn’t have to be like this, that it’s possible to get clean and have a real house and work in a shop or something. Clearly he has no fucking idea what I came from. He said that I am pretty and nice and I told him to fuck off and find a nice little nursing student. Anyway.

  Ellen said I should write about my life. I am trying, and it isn’t so hard to write about my life now, but it is hard to write about the beginnings. The glass is starting to wear off a little and it’s hard to concentrate, and to even remember things right. My mind feels like soup sometimes. Maybe I’ll just write what I remember, even if it is out of context; I guess it doesn’t matter much. Ellen says that thinking about the things that hurt make us grow, so I guess I need to prepare for that, but I’m not really that sure I want to grow. Because what would I grow into? It’s okay where I am now, doing what I do. If I grow, like Ellen said, then everything might change, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that change is just another word for everything getting even worse. But I’m gonna try – here goes.

  *

  I know I have to be careful with the sugarcoating. Now, everything about my first twelve years seems rosy, but I realize that can’t have been the case. There would have been childhood accidents, upsets, disappointments and such things, I just don’t remember any of them very clearly. Life began for me in a pretty decent way. I was born on a large, remote farm – a real Värmlandsgård in a forest clearing by a huge lake, a good twenty minutes’ drive north from Munkfors. Värmland is a land of dense forests and beautiful lakes, with sweet little towns surrounded by agricultural land. My mother, Therese, and father, Samuel, mostly made money from timber. My mother also produced and sold apple juice from our special apples, which were rumored to be the best in all of Sweden, and her äppelsaft was even sold in a couple of nice cafés in Stockholm. My half brother, Ludwig, is fifteen years older than me, and had already left for university in Lund by the time I was old enough to really notice stuff. We don’t have much to do with one another these days; he’s the CEO of a technology company in Stockholm and finds his junkie sister embarrassing as hell, though he does give me money sometimes.

  I used to help my mother with the apples. She had a small workshop in the barn with an old fruit press and several workstations where the pressed apples would pass through sifting cloths before being bottled into handblown glass bottles and labeled “Mors Most”. I helped her rinse the cloths out in between each batch, following the brown apple particles with my eyes as they spun down the drain. We fed the snaky peelings to the pigs, and the cores were heaped on the compost. In my memories, it seems like it was always late summer, with swollen red apples dripping from the trees waiting to be picked and golden afternoon sun making the fields glow, followed by cool, clear evenings. I don’t remember the winters as clearly, except for a kind of constant half darkness, and the roaring fire in the kitchen, where my mother and I would sit every evening, stitching or reading. I also don’t remember my father well – he died in a timbering accident when I was seven, and although we missed him and mourned him, I also came to love the new life that emerged – just my mother and me on the farm.

  She’d had me when she was only twenty-one and loved to play with me and take care of the animals on the farm. My horse, Besta, was an old Värmlandshäst, a workhorse breed native to this region, and he was my best friend. Because we lived so remotely and I didn’t have any siblings close in age, I never did play much with other children. I had some friends from school, but they mostly lived near each other in the little town, and I ended up not being included in most of their social activities. I have wondered if anything would have been different if I hadn’t always felt like an outsider. It seemed to me that Besta could communicate with me and that he was much more clever than people usually say horses can be. He and I had an easy understanding, and it was deepened by something that happened when I was nine; Besta had seemed unwell for a few days, and though the change in his behavior was slight, it was very noticeable to me. He was subdued, jittery and stayed back in the field when I came. I insisted to my mother that she call the vet, but she said we’d wait a day or two and see how he got on. He was, after all, an old horse and they do get stubborn with age, like men.

  I remember walking away from the field he stood in with the other horses, my heart hammering, feeling in my very bones that I should turn around, that Besta was telling me something. Suddenly I was struck by an intense and overpowering sharp pain in my right thigh, and it was so acute that I crumpled to the ground in the middle of the lawn in front of the house. I felt my leg underneath my summer dress and it was rock-hard and swollen. I closed my eyes and began screaming for my mother and in the moments before she reached me, frantic, kneeling down in the dewy grass, I saw in my mind a large, black ball of coagulated blood. As soon as the vision had appeared, it evaporated, and with it the pain went, too. I lay in my mother’s arms, breathing heavily and kept feeling my leg where the swelling had been, but it was smooth and soft, as usual.

  ‘Besta has a blood clot!’ I cried, and my mother nodded seriously. The vet said if the clot hadn’t been discovered when it was, Besta would surely have died. And then, the winter I was about to turn twelve, I began to avoid my horse. I started spending every afternoon in my bedroom instead of in the stables, and my mother became very concerned. She tried to talk to me, and even brought me to see a doctor, but I couldn’t tell her the real reason I was behaving so strangely. I should have; maybe it wouldn’t have been too late. For several months, every time I went to see Besta, I had a clear and sudden image in my mind of my mother with a big, growing mass in her head. It was such a frightening image, and it only happened when I was with Besta, and how I wish I’d listened to what the old horse was trying to tell me, because even then, I knew it was true. By the time my mother’s tumor was discovered after she began suffering seizures, it was already Grade Four and inoperable.

  Damn Ellen and her writing and her pain and her growt
h. I shouldn’t say damn Ellen, though, because she’s pretty near the nicest person I’ve ever met. Even now, years after it was her job to deal with me, she meets with me every few months and we sit at a bakery in town and eat kanelbullar and she pretends not to notice that I’m high as a kite. I’m high now, too, and it’s a good kind of trip, like when everything seems both mellow and clear at the same time, not fuzzy and confusing, which happens often. This is the kind of high when even though what I’m writing hurts, it doesn’t quite reach me in the heart – like I’m in a cocoon.

  I went to live with my mother’s aunt, Marie, and her husband, Sven. They hated me and I hated them and I’m not sure I want to say that much more than that. This isn’t one of those things where I might read these words back in a couple of months and be reminded of some funny or nice episodes that happened during that time – there weren’t any. In the three years I lived there, I went from being a happy, well-adjusted girl who dreamed of becoming a vet, to a severely depressed, anorexic teenager. I became addicted to crystal meth, cocaine and, by the time Sven had grown tired of forcing himself upon a broken teenager, heroin. I won’t lie. Drug addiction is not the worst thing that has ever happened to me, nor the many unpleasant things I’ve had to do to get hold of the next hit – that’s what everyone gets wrong. If only you could get clean seems to be the consensus of every teacher, doctor, therapist, social worker I’ve ever met. They just don’t get it. I don’t want to get clean, never have. Smack is the only friend I have, even if it is a friend that wants to kill me and will most likely succeed.

  Marie and Sven sold my farm and used up the money. How they got away with it, I don’t know. I think this is the only thing Ludwig pities me for, and the only reason he still occasionally gives me money. Out of the five horses, four were sold to a neighboring farm, but they wouldn’t have Besta because he was too old to work, so he was put down. I think I’ll stop now for a while.

  *

  It’s been a few days since I wrote anything here and it didn’t feel like a very healthy thing for me to do. When the rush wore off and I reread my words they made me cry my eyes out, cry like I haven’t in years, and it made me use even more than I normally do. I was in such a bad state that I called Ellen late in the evening and left a long message on her answerphone about how she’d promised me that I was strong enough to write about my life and then read about it and learn something and grow but she never called back and for the rest of the night I smoked so much meth I passed out while I was still holding the pipe, and when I woke, I had a bad burn on my arm, and Ellen was sitting on the upturned crate by my mattress, serious and pale. And so, yes, I have come to miss being locked up in a juvenile institution where, at least, there are people employed to care for you. Or maybe I just miss Ellen.

  We went to walk by the river, but I wasn’t able to walk very far, so we sat down on a bench, though it was covered by a layer of frost and our breath came out in white bursts when we spoke. Ellen told me about her oldest daughter, Vicky, who is my age, and lives in Australia, studying media. Ellen misses her and wants her to come home, and I felt so empty because nobody misses me or wants me to come home.

  ‘Annika,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come and stay with me and Josef and Sofia for a while? A couple of weeks perhaps?’ I shook my head and laughed, because although of course I would like to stay with Ellen and Josef and Sofia for a while, that is absolutely not an option. Ellen has known me since I was fifteen, and she is probably the only person living who cares about me. That’s now, when she’s sheltered from the darkest aspects of what I’m really like. She sees me every few months and looks concerned while I pick at a cinnamon bun. While she knows the extent of my using, she just hasn’t seen it close up; the blood, the pain, the desperation, the men... She can’t possibly understand how tired I really am, and I don’t want her to know. She didn’t press me on her offer to stay, but started to tell me about a program she’d heard about, a government-funded rehabilitation program in Arvika that she could inquire about on my behalf if I wanted, make a few calls...

  ‘No,’ I said, too forcefully, and she looked disappointed for a moment, but then assumed her professional expression of eternal patience, which I’m sure she needs in her line of work. This is what people don’t get. I don’t want to be clean.

  Annika L., Karlstad, May 2010

  Rereading those words frightens me to the core. Who is she? Who is that girl? I ask myself this question, over and over, and it seems impossible that she was me, just one short year ago. That dilapidated garage floor with the bloody, uncovered mattress, crazy old Sylvia, violent, dirty Roy, the constant cycle of meth and smack and fucking Roy and his friends for more smack and meth... Who was that girl? It doesn’t matter, I’ve learned. Over the past year I have learned that I don’t have to hold on to every incarnation of myself – it’s okay to just be Anni as I am right now, today. Twenty-six now, and it doesn’t feel like the end of the road. I can look back, able to hold the pain and process it, and while it doesn’t go away, it exists inside me like the scars on my skin. My teeth are still bad, but I’m on the waiting list for restorative dental treatment. I still smoke, but no nasty junk – only Prince Mild now.

  In Ellen and Josef’s house there are rules. Many rules. No alcohol, boys, drugs obviously, video games or cigarettes. I follow all of them, except the one about cigarettes – occasionally I’ll smoke out of the window in the dead of the night when the others are sleeping, and stand staring at the moon hanging full and sad above the trees, and at times like that I just can’t believe that I’m there, in a normal home with a normal family. Ellen and Josef are always saying that they are lucky to have me. They ask me what I want to do next with my life. Only recently have I let myself think about how I used to want to be a vet, and it has occurred to me that I would still love that. I haven’t said it out loud to anyone, because it still seems to me like saying you’d quite like to travel in time, or win the Nobel Prize. Ellen says that I can be who I want to be, but the problem with that is that I never wanted to be anyone at all particularly, so I have to think a lot about what my options are.

  A month ago, I was invited to return to my old junior school, Vasshettan Sekundär, to talk about drug addiction and my way back to sobriety. It was a joint effort between Värmland County Educational Department and the hospital that treated me, orchestrated by Ellen. I was also interviewed by the local newspaper. Before I went back to the school, I had planned to at least try to look as nice as possible, though that is difficult when you’ve spent ten years on hard drugs, including crystal meth. It shows on my face, put it that way. But on the morning of the speech I decided to not try to cover up the way I look, or what smack and meth has done to me. When I walked onto the podium, I heard a small shocked gasp from some of the teenagers in the front at the sight of me, just a few years older than them, literally ravaged by drugs. A few of them have probably secretly smoked pot, or even dabbled with a line or two of coke, but perhaps meeting me will make them think twice. Afterwards, they asked me questions. How did you finally manage to get clean? What was different this time? Somebody cared, I said, and found Ellen’s eyes in the crowd.

  As a continuation of the intensive rehabilitation program I have been through, I am still in biweekly counseling sessions. My therapist, Dr Faber, tells me what Ellen told me back in the day at Kungshemmet; that frightening and painful memories hurt much less when we bring them into the light and give them a little bit of our attention, but not too much. Acknowledge them and accept that they cannot be changed, then let them go. Just let them go. I’ve decided to attempt to return to this journal now that my mind is a whole lot clearer and my heart stronger.

  A couple of days after the speech at my old school, Ellen suggested that she and I go visit my mother’s grave. When she said it, it occurred to me that I didn’t know where it was. Marie and Sven had never told me, and I felt overcome by sadness again, for that girl I had been, and of course, for my mother. At first I didn’
t want to, and I suppose I was afraid of facing everything I have suppressed so hard for so many years, but because I have learned that doing as Ellen suggests is generally a good idea, I agreed. We drove to Munkfors, and it was surreal, passing through the streets I hadn’t seen since I was a child. It seemed impossible that the farm I’d loved so much was only a short drive away, and that it still actually presumably exists in the real world, perhaps even much the same. I imagined what it would be like to drive there with Ellen, seeing the field empty of Besta and the other horses, the barn used for something other than äppelsaft brewing, the house lived in by someone other than my mother and me. This was difficult and it took a lot of effort to touch upon these thoughts and then just let them go. I had to bring forth Dr Faber’s calm, brown eyes, her soothing voice always saying, Let it go, Anni, just let it go... But eventually it worked, and I managed to return my attention to Munkfors’s empty mid-morning streets.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked Ellen as she turned onto the country road that I recognized as the one that led to my parents’ farm, twenty minutes north.