The Invisible Man from Salem (21 page)

‘Uh-huh?' said Grim.

‘Vlad and Fred.'

‘The idiots that used to give you grief?'

‘Yes. I saw them earlier on. Do you think …?' I took another sip. It scraped my throat horribly, burned my stomach. I did my best not to sound scared. ‘Do you think they've moved back?'

‘Why would anyone move back here? I bet they were just visiting or something.'

He took his Discman out of his bag, gave me one of the earphones, and we sat listening to music and drinking until the batteries ran out, which didn't happen until very, very late. After that, I hobbled home, terrified I might bump into them — but I never did.

‘YOU SEEM A BIT DOWN
, Leo.' My dad looked up from the paper, and put his coffee cup down on the table.

‘I'm just tired.' My head was pounding, and every time I blinked my eyelids hurt. ‘I was up late last night.'

‘Late.' He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I didn't hear you come in.'

‘I don't know what time it was.'

‘Considering how you smell, at least it's not hard to work out what you were up to,' he said.

‘I don't smell.'

‘You stink.'

I chewed my toast slowly.

‘Don't tell Mum.'

‘Where do you get the booze from? Is it smuggled?'

‘No, Dad,' I sighed.

‘I can't stop you from drinking. We never stopped Micke. But …'

‘Oh yes we did,' Mum's voice came from the bathroom, followed by her footsteps as she came into the kitchen. She looked at me with a stern expression. ‘If you drink again, you won't be allowed out.'

‘Annie,' Dad began, ‘he's not — '

‘No,' she said sharply and stared at him. ‘I've had enough. He's never home anymore.'

‘Annie, let me talk to him.'

She looked at me, then Dad, then back at me.

‘You pull yourself together, starting right now,' she said before she left the room.

Dad looked tired. He drank some coffee and stared at the half-eaten toast on my plate.

‘Aren't you going to finish it?'

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘You need to eat.' He hesitated. ‘Your mum and I would both be a lot happier if you just got a job.'

‘Dad, for fuck—'

‘Yeah, yeah,' he cut me off and held his hands up, apologetically. ‘I know.' He put his forearms against the edge of the table and leant over. ‘She's right, Leo. But there's something else, isn't there?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘As I said, you look a bit down.' He waited, but when I didn't say anything he added, ‘You can talk to me if you need to.'

I looked up, unsure.

‘How well do you know the people who live in the Triad?'

He raised an eyebrow.

‘No one knows anyone here really, not even those living within the same four walls. So I can't claim to know them at all.'

‘Okay.'

‘Is it someone in this block?'

‘No.' I nodded towards the window. ‘Someone in that block.'

He followed my gaze towards the block where the Grimbergs lived.

‘I see.'

‘You don't know anyone who lives there?'

He shook his head and drank some coffee.

‘It's a girl,' he said, matter-of-factly.

‘What makes you think that?'

‘Dads see that sort of thing.'

I took a deep breath, and Dad looked hopeful.
He tried
, I thought to myself. I stood up and left without saying anything, and went to my room. I closed the door and sat down by the window, looked over at the block they lived in, and studied the windows of their flat, hoping for a glimpse of Julia.

NOTHING HAPPENED
. I started feeling pathetic, and Dad didn't come in, so I lay down on the bed instead and listened to music for the rest of the day. I thought about ringing them, but I was worried that Grim would answer; he would notice that something was wrong, I was sure of that. And if Julia answered, Grim might ask her who she'd been talking to, and then she'd have to lie. She wasn't good at lying, which was one of the things I liked about her, but this time her inability to lie was not helpful.

Eventually I rang anyway.

‘Diana Grimberg.'

‘I …' I began. ‘It's Leo. Could I …?'

‘Wait,' she said. ‘Julia. Phone.'

Diana's voice was so quiet that it really shouldn't have been possible to hear it unless you were standing right next to her. Maybe you develop hypersensitive hearing or heightened awareness if you live with someone like that, because I soon heard footsteps coming towards the phone.

‘Who is it?' Julia asked Diana, but got no reply.

‘Hello?' she said instead.

‘Hi,' I said.

‘Oh, hi. Hang on.'

Footsteps. A door opening and then closing. Music in the background that slipped away and disappeared.

We talked as long as we could. In a few days' time I was going to Öland for a week. My uncle lived there with his family, and we spent a week there every summer, at the end of the holidays. That was the only time I used to leave Stockholm. My brother had always come, too, but this time he couldn't because he had to work.

‘Why didn't you say anything?' she asked, sounding hurt.

‘I haven't … I was thinking about not going at first.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because of you.'

‘Okay,' she said hesitantly. ‘But now you are?'

‘I think so.'

‘What's changed?'

‘I don't know … nothing.'

‘Must be something.'

I lay there for ages, listening to her breathing. I wondered if Grim was lying on the other side of the wall, listening to us talking.

ON ÖLAND
, the time dragged. We came back after a week, and in that short time something had happened in Salem: I met Grim outside the youth centre, and his eye was purple-blue and swollen. He was trying to hide it behind a pair of Wayfarer shades, but it wasn't working — the bruising was too big. We sat on a bench in the sunshine. He told me how he'd made an ID card for a guy who'd tried to use it to get into a club.

‘There was nothing wrong with the card,' Grim said. ‘The problem was with this idiot. He wanted to get in to places where you need to be eighteen, and I sorted that out for him. Would you believe that the idiot goes to a twenty-plus club? He was denied entry, of course. What does he do next? Drives out to Salem with two mates, looking for me, because he thinks I've ripped him off. They even came to our place. When Dad found out, he was drunk, and he chased me out of the flat. The guy and his two mates were waiting outside, and I got a smack in the face before I could get away.' He shrugged. ‘Fuck it.'

‘But why did your dad chase you out?'

‘He wasn't chasing me out — he was just chasing me. But it was better to try and get out than to get caught.'

I tried to imagine Klas Grimberg chasing his son. During that dinner at their place, there had been something in his look that suggested he was probably capable of it, despite his measured calmness. But he had been sober then.

Grim pulled out a folded envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, just as someone came round the corner of the youth centre. He was our age, with baggy jeans and big clonking Adidas, a hoodie, and a cap. He didn't go to our school, I was pretty sure of that.

‘Everything all right?' Grim said when he came up to us.

‘Yeah, man,' he mumbled, and glanced at me.

‘He's safe.'

The guy looked around and gave a little nod. His hoodie had a pocket on the front, from which he pulled out neatly folded five-hundred-krona notes and then handed them to Grim, in exchange for the envelope. It all happened so quickly that if I'd blinked I would have missed it.

‘Have you copped a beating?' he asked, looking at Grim.

‘Some guy misunderstood something, that's all.'

‘Shall I do him?'

‘No.' Grim looked around. ‘See you round.'

‘Okay.'

He turned and trudged off, and we headed back towards the Triad. Grim counted the money.

‘Fifteen hundred,' I said.

‘I'm getting more and more expensive,' Grim said.

IN A LOT OF WAYS
, we were very different. But more than anything else, this meant that we complemented each other. We would now sometimes think the same thing, say the same word. We'd started using each other's phrases. Without realising, I'd started buying clothes that were more like his, and he had several pieces of clothing that could have come straight out of my wardrobe.

I assumed that these sorts of changes were almost inevitable when two people spend a lot of time together, understand each other, and share so much, but perhaps there was also a deeper bond between us. I was the only one who knew about Grim's fake-ID business. Apart from his customers, of course — but he told most of them that he was just the middleman. He claimed that no one would have believed that a seventeen-year-old possessed the skills he did. He was probably right. That would lead to suspicion, and suspicion was bad for business.

IN SALEM
, high summer had made way for a cooler end to the season. It was the end of the holidays, and when they were over Julia was going to join me and Grim at Rönninge High School. We would be walking the same corridors, maybe meeting up at break-times.

The day after I came home from Öland, the phone rang. Dad answered, and knocked on my door, smiling.

‘For you. Julia.'

I pushed him out of the room and closed the door.

‘Hello?' I said.

‘Hi.'

‘Hi.'

I had missed her voice.

‘How are things?' I asked.

‘Good.' She cleared her throat. ‘I'm home alone today.'

‘Are you?'

‘John's gone out. Mum and Dad are at Granddad's.'

Diana Grimberg's father lived in a nursing home outside Skarpnäck. It was death's waiting room, but while they waited for the next life, each month there was a big dinner for the old folk and their relatives. Julia had gone along once and said it was a real drag, a view shared by both Grim and Klas. The only one who had enjoyed the dinner was Diana, who was apparently determined to make dinnertime as uncomfortable as possible.

‘Do you want to come round?' Julia asked.

‘Yes.'

When I went out that day I had a feeling that something significant was going to happen. It couldn't go on like this. The door to the Grimbergs' flat wasn't locked, and I walked into their hall.

‘Julia?'

‘Come in.'

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, and she looked up at me.

‘You've done something with your hair,' I said.

‘I've put curls in.' She hesitated. ‘Don't you like it?'

‘I …'

‘Actually, you know what, don't say anything. It shouldn't matter. You know? It shouldn't matter what my stupid brother's stupid fucking mate thinks of my hair. It doesn't matter. So don't say anything.'

I sat down on the edge of the bed and said: ‘Lovely.'

‘Eh?'

‘I think it looks lovely.'

Julia sighed heavily. Her room was a mess. It didn't look like it had been tidied since the last time I'd been there.

‘This was just a laugh,' she said. ‘For me, anyway.' She avoided looking at me. ‘Something I was drawn to, maybe because it's taboo. I mean, my brother's best mate. It's the sort of thing you only see in bad comedies.' She laughed, but there was no joy in the laughter. ‘Maybe I've always been drawn to this sort of thing. I mean, to things that are just a bit wrong. Like the coat with the weed, that I told you about. The one I stole at school?'

I nodded. I remembered.

‘I hadn't really thought about it before now, this week you've been away, but maybe it's my fault. I never meant it to get serious.'

‘But it got serious?' I asked, unsure how I was supposed to be feeling.

‘I think so.'

Then she snogged me, violently, before she reached for the stereo remote and turned it on.

‘Julia, we should talk. We should talk some more.'

Julia turned up the volume. It took a couple of seconds before I realised it was ‘Dancing Barefoot', and I only knew it because Julia once told me — I can't remember when — that it was one of her favourite songs.