The Crow Girl (92 page)

She leaves her body, glides up the wall and lies down on the ceiling.

The feeling is soothing and pleasant, like drifting around in water. But when she tries to turn her head and look at herself and Jeanette down below under the sheets, every muscle in her body seems to be locked and the pleasant feeling is instantly replaced by panic.

Suddenly she’s lying back in bed again and she can’t move, as if her body has been paralysed by some sort of poison. She realises that someone is sitting on her, an indescribable weight that’s numbing her body and making it impossible to breathe.

The unknown body leaves her, and even if she can’t turn her head and look around, she senses that the body has got off her and is getting out of bed behind her before leaving the room like a fleeing shadow.

Then the feeling of paralysis vanishes as quickly as it arrived. She can breathe again and starts moving her fingers, then her arms and legs. She realises that she’s wide awake when she hears the sound of deep breathing beside her, and calms down. She knows she’s going to need Jeanette’s help if she’s to stand any chance of becoming whole.

When did everything really begin? When did she invent her first alternative personality? When she was very young, of course, since dissociation is the defence of a child.

She glances at the time. Just after four thirty. She won’t be able to sleep now.

She can take Gao, Solace, the Worker, the Analyst and the Moaning Minnie off the list, because she understands them. They’ve all played out their roles.

That leaves the Reptile, the Sleepwalker and Crow Girl. They’re more difficult, because they’re closer to her, and weren’t created from people around her. They
are
her.

The Reptile is probably the next in line to disappear. That personality’s behaviour follows a simple logic with its roots in the primitive, she’s worked that much out, and it’s that idea she needs to bear in mind when she isolates, deconstructs and analyses that particular personality.

Simultaneously destroying it and incorporating it.

Sofia Zetterlund, she thinks. I have to meet her. She’ll be able to help me remember how I used these personalities as a child and teenager. But can I really go and see her?

If I do, will it be as Sofia or as Victoria?

Or like today, both of us, simultaneously?

She lies there for a bit longer before carefully getting up and starting to put her clothes on.

She needs to move ahead, needs to heal, and she can’t do that here, alone in the darkness.

She needs to go home.

She leaves a note for Jeanette on the bedside table, shuts the bedroom door and calls for a taxi.

Libido, she thinks as she sits at the kitchen table waiting for the taxi. The life instinct. When does it stop? What does her own libido consist of?

She watches a fly crawling up the kitchen window. If she was starving and there was nothing to eat except that fly, would she eat it?

THE FIRST THING
the woman sees is the corner of a black plastic bag. Then she realises that she ought to call the police. She’s on her way home from a bar and it’s after four o’clock. Late, sure, but nothing for her to worry about, seeing as she got fired from her job as a housekeeper two years ago and no longer has to worry about such banal concerns as regular sleep and normal responsibilities.

The evening hadn’t ended the way she had hoped, and she’s standing half drunk and disappointed on the quayside at Norra Hammarbyhamnen, not far from Skanstull and a stone’s throw from the ferry to Sickla, watching the black bag bob in the water.

At first she’s inclined not to care, but then she remembers all the detective shows she’s seen on television, where a member of the public finds the body. So she gets down on her knees at the edge of the quayside and pulls at the bag. And for the same trite reason she carefully opens the bag, and to her surprise realises that her suspicions were correct.

In the bag is a withered arm. A leg and a hand.

But what she hasn’t counted on is how her own body would react when she saw a dead body for the first time.

The woman’s first thought is that it must be a doll that’s rotted in the water. When she sees that it isn’t a doll, and that the small child’s eyes are missing, its tongue appears to have been bitten off and its face is covered with bite marks, she throws up.

Then she calls the police.

At first no one believes her, and it takes her more than seven minutes to persuade the male officer in charge of the emergency call centre that she’s actually telling the truth.

When she hangs up she notices that her phone is shiny with vomit.

She sits down on the quayside, with a firm grip on the plastic bag to make sure it doesn’t disappear, and then she waits.

She knows what she’s holding, but pretends it’s something else. Tries to forget what she just saw. A child’s face shredded by another person’s teeth.

Human teeth really aren’t meant to cause damage.

IT’S EARLY MORNING
, and she’s sitting at the computer in her study and staring at the screen.

Lasse’s alive, she thinks.

The address is the same, Pålnäsvägen in Saltsjöbaden, and she’s also managed to find out that he travels a lot for his work. She’s found his name on a list of participants at a conference in Düsseldorf that took place just three weeks ago.

She finds herself laughing. Admittedly, he had betrayed her, but she hadn’t killed him as a result.

Now that she’s got confirmation of that everything feels so trivial. She hasn’t just invented alternative lives for herself, but for other people, too, dragging them down with her in her own internal collapse. Lasse is alive, and maybe he is living a double life as well, just like before, but with some other woman. His life has moved on outside her own enclosed world. And she’s actually pleased about that.

The process has escalated.

She still has a lot to do before she can allow herself a few hours of sleep. She’s on something of a roll, and she has to make the most of it. She feels focused, and the buzzing in her head is soothing.

She gets up and goes into the kitchen.

Behind the kitchen door there are two bin bags full of paper. She’s started clearing out the concealed room, and will soon be able to get rid of everything. But she isn’t quite finished yet.

During the night she had one question ringing in her head: What is the serial killer’s libido, and might she be able to find her own by studying that of others? The most extreme, deviant examples?

There are piles of paper on the kitchen table along with the biography of Andrei Chikatilo, and she tears out the pages she marked earlier with folded corners.

She reads that it takes time for the enzymes in the brain to break down experiences and create a second ego. That the second ego isn’t scared of gutting a stomach of its contents, or cooking and eating a womb, while the first ego trembles with horror at the very thought.

Andrei Chikatilo was as divided as one cell from another.

Eggs and cells, she thinks. Dividing.

Primitive life. The life of a Reptile.

Sticky chocolate cake.
Two eggs, two hundred and fifty grams of sugar, four tablespoons of cocoa, two teaspoons of vanilla sugar, one hundred grams of butter, one hundred and fifty grams of flour and half a teaspoon of salt.

There’s another article on the kitchen table. About Ed Gein, born 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, died 1984 at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison.

The article is about what the police found in Gein’s home, and she’s stapled it to a picture of a snake swallowing an ostrich egg, the largest single cell in the world.

Gein’s home had looked like an exhibition space.

There were four noses, a large quantity of intact human bones and fragments of bones, one head in a paper bag, another in a canvas bag, and nine labia in a shoebox. Gein had fashioned bowls and bed frames out of human skulls, seats and face masks out of human skin, a belt of women’s nipples and a lampshade with the skin of a face. They also found ten women’s heads with their scalps sawn off, as well as a pair of lips as the toggle on a roller blind.

Gender and bestiality belong together, which is why she’s stapled the photograph of the snake swallowing the egg to the article about Ed Gein.

Another part of the picture is being despised by other people. But what comes first? Loathing yourself, others, or your own sexuality?

As far as Andrei Chikatilo is concerned, people disliked him because of what they saw as the offensively feminine way he moved, his sloping shoulders, his whole appearance, actually, and they were disgusted by his habit of constantly touching his genitals. He murdered and ate parts of his victims because he couldn’t get sexually aroused any other way. He followed his reptilian, primitive urges. One central part of Ed Gein’s complex case was his desire to have a sex change and transform himself into his own mother. He tried to make a costume from the skin of women’s corpses that he dug up, so he could wear it and become a woman.

The article refers to an interrogation where the ritual was described as transsexual, and in the margin Victoria had noted with a red pen:

Needs, she thinks, remembering what she read during her studies about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. She also recalls where she was when she read about it. In Sierra Leone, more specifically in the kitchen of the house they were renting outside Freetown, just before Solace came into the room. Victoria had been eating her father’s disgusting porridge, with far too much sweetened cinnamon.

While she pretends to eat the porridge she thinks about what she’s read about the hierarchy of needs, which starts with physiological needs. Needs such as food and sleep. She thinks how he is systematically denying them to her. After that comes the need for security, then the need for love and belonging, and then the need for esteem. All things he has denied her, and is continuing to deny her. At the top of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualisation, a term she can’t even understand. As far as her needs are concerned, he has denied her everything.

Now she knows.

She created the Reptile in order to be able to eat and sleep.

Later in life she also used the Reptile to be able to make love. When she and Lasse slept together, it was the Reptile that allowed him inside, because that was the only way for her to enjoy a man’s body. And the Reptile had group sex with Lasse in a nightclub in Toronto. But when she slept with Jeanette the Reptile wasn’t present, she’s quite sure of that, and the realisation fills her with a joy so intense it makes her eyes water.

But what else has the Reptile done? Has it killed?

She thinks about Samuel Bai.

She had met him outside a McDonald’s at Medborgarplatsen, and had taken him home and drugged him. Then she had showered and, when he woke up again and was still groggy, she had revealed her body to him, luring him to her and finally killing him by smashing a hammer into his right eye.

The bestiality of the Reptile. The bestiality of the murderer. She had enjoyed it.

Or had she?

She gets up from the kitchen table, so quickly that the chair topples over onto the floor, and hurries into the living room. The sofa, she thinks, the bloodstain on the sofa that Jeanette once came close to seeing. Samuel’s blood.

She literally turns the sofa upside down, examining the cushions and upholstery down to the smallest detail, but the stain isn’t there. It isn’t there because it had never been there.

The Reptile isn’t her hunger fire. It’s a fake, imaginary libido.

She laughs again and sits down on the sofa.

Everything that happened from when she met Samuel at Medborgarplatsen to when she was sitting here fresh from the shower is true. But she never attacked him with a hammer.

All she had done was throw him out when he started pawing at her.

Simple as that.

The last time she saw Samuel was when she threw him out. She’s sure of that now.

He had enemies, and had been beaten up several times. A fight that got out of hand? It’s up to the police to find that out. Not her.

She goes back into the kitchen and opens the fridge. A dirty beetroot and a few eggs. She gets two out and rolls them in her hand. Two unfertilised female sex cells, cold against her palm.

She shuts the fridge, gets an aluminium bowl out of the cupboard above the sink, and cracks the eggs. Then two hundred and fifty grams of sugar, four tablespoons of cocoa, two teaspoons of vanilla sugar, one hundred grams of butter, one hundred and fifty grams of flour and half a teaspoon of salt.

She stirs the mixture with a fork before she starts to eat it.

The Reptile is cold-blooded and enjoys being a living creature. It suns itself on the beach or on a warm rock in a summer meadow. She remembers how, as a little reptile, she had burrowed her head into her father’s armpit; the smell of his sweat was security, and in there she could feel what it was like to be an animal, without any self-assumed responsibility for feelings and deeds.

That’s the only memory she has of ever feeling secure with her father. No matter what else he went on to do, that memory is priceless.

At the same time she knows she never had a chance to satisfy her own daughter’s needs. Madeleine has no memories of her, no memories of her mum.

No security at all.

Madeleine must hate me, she thinks.

JEANETTE FEELS A
pang of disappointment. When she woke up and found the bed empty she had hoped Sofia was in the shower or downstairs in the kitchen making breakfast for them. She hadn’t said anything to suggest she was in a hurry to get home. But Jeanette still has a smile on her face as she lets the duvet slip down to her feet and rolls onto her back, stretching her arms and legs out and looking at her naked body.