Me on the Floor, Bleeding Read online

  Me on the Floor, Bleeding

  www.stockholmtext.com

  The quote on p. 79 is from the song “4 minutes”, written by Madonna, Tim Mosley, Justin Timberlake and Nate Hills

  The quote on p. 81 is from The Smiths’ song “Panic”, written by Steven Morrissey

  The quote on p. 83-84 is from Human Leauge’s song “Don’t you want me”, written by Philip Oakey, John William Callis and Adrian Wright.

  The quote on p. 95 is from The Existential Conversation by Emmy van Deurzen

  The quote on p. 109 is from Alien Ant Farm’s version of the song “Smooth Criminal”, written by Michael Jackson

  The quote on p. 132 and p. 133 is from The Cure’s song “Fire in Cairo”, written by Robert Smith

  The quote on p. 195 is from Joy Division’s song “Love will tear us apart”, written by Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis

  The quote on p. 236 is from New Order’s song “True Faith”, written by Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Hague

  Stockholm Text

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  www.stockholmtext.com

  © 2010 Jenny Jägerfeld, by agreement with Grand Agency

  Stockholm Text, Stockholm 2013

  Translation: Susan Beard

  Cover: Ermir Peci

  ISBN ebook: 978-91-87173-93-6

  This book was partly founded by a grant given by The Swedish Arts Council

  To my sweet siblings Patric, John and Caroline.

  (I think Maja would have wished that she had some.)

  THURSDAY, 12 APRIL

  Spurting Blood

  It was a quarter to one on Thursday the twelfth of April, one day before the so-called unlucky thirteenth and I had just sawn off the tip of my left thumb with an electric saw.

  I stared at my thumb – what was left of it, I mean – with its pale midwinter skin and the pinky-red stuff inside. The flesh. In a detached kind of way I thought I’d sawn it off quite neatly, that the edges of the cut were straight, which was good. Wasn’t it? I searched my mind for relevant experiences but it was blank. Empty. My knowledge of sawn-off body parts was clearly limited. Anyway, the cut was pretty difficult to make out because a massive stream of blood suddenly spurted right up into the air. Like a little geyser.

  The saw fell to the floor with a violent crash. Perhaps I dropped it, perhaps I threw it away from me, I don’t remember. I grabbed my thumb with my right hand and held it tight, so tight my knuckles turned white. One second passed, then another. I watched as the saw jerked across the floor, its blade wildly vibrating.

  Everything in front of me swam about like bad television reception and a stream of blood forced its way out between the thumb and index finger of my right hand. As if on cue blood began pouring out between every finger and my right hand gradually turned bright red. I tried to squeeze even tighter but the blood kept gushing through. It dropped onto the white worktop with such relentless speed you’d think someone was spraying it with red paint.

  Suddenly it felt as if my stomach was emptying itself of its contents, as if I was in a lift and the cable had just snapped, and instead of slowly travelling upwards I found myself freefalling down the shaft. I was forced to let go of my thumb and grab the back of the chair to keep my balance. That was the starting signal for the blood: it spiralled and poured and pumped out from what had once been one of my most important digits. The starched front of my dress shirt was sprayed red.

  Shit. Dad’s going to be angry.

  This ought to be hurting, I thought objectively. Why isn’t it hurting?

  At that very moment a bomb detonated right in the middle of my hand.

  And then another.

  And then another.

  The pain was red hot and hard. The pain was absolutely, inconceivably agonising. I tried to breathe but I couldn’t. My throat had closed up. The oxygen had run out.

  I looked around in mute panic. All work had stopped. No one was at the potter’s wheel. No-one was moulding plaster, bending metal or messing about with papier-mâché. They were just staring silently in my direction, in the direction of the pool of fresh blood on the floor. At my bloodstained hands and the blood-red hand print on the back of the wooden chair.

  They were silent.

  They had never been so silent. The only thing you could hear was the saw aggressively attacking the floor. The sound of metal teeth against stone.

  It was like I was forty metres under the sea. The pressure of thousands of square metres of water prevented any quick movements and made my body slow and sluggish. My vision became indistinct and cloudy and the sound of the saw was elongated and distorted. I looked at my classmates. They were gently undulating at their workbenches. Like seaweed, I thought in the split second before I finally managed to gasp in some air and scream at the top of my lungs. It was a raw and rasping sound, as if I hadn’t opened my mouth all day.

  I screamed, wide-eyed, as one explosion after another went off in my thumb. I screamed like I had never, and I mean ever, screamed before and it was impossible, totally out of the question, to stop. I tried to meet Enzo’s eyes but his expression was difficult to read behind his protective goggles. The elastic around his head was so tight that it dug into his skin and pushed his chubby cheeks upwards, squashing them together underneath the scratched lenses. He broke away from the frozen crowd, moving jerkily like a robot. Without taking his eyes off me he bent down and picked up something small from the floor, something a pinky-red colour, and he stretched out his arm to give it to me. When I didn’t make any attempt to take it he placed it in the palm of my right hand. Then he sank silently to the blood-covered floor, less than one metre away from the saw.

  Valter ran. He ran so fast his soft curls flapped about. Normally his movements were slow and dignified. Not now. Never before had I seen him move so fast from his desk to the work benches at the back. I didn’t hear the characteristic clicking of his heels against the stone floor and that surprised me until I realised it was my own voice, my own continuous bellowing, that prevented every other sound from reaching my ears.

  I looked down at my unmangled right hand and studied the object in my palm. I knew what was lying there but still I couldn’t understand it. I just couldn’t, somehow. It was too . . . absurd. Plain disgusting too, for that matter.

  There in the palm of my hand lay a part of my body. A part of me.

  The tip of my thumb.

  It was so light, no heavier than a pea, or maybe two. I could hardly feel it.

  I didn’t want to look at it but it was impossible not to.

  The upper rounded surface of the nail was intact. A little sliver of wood shaving had fastened in the bloody, fleshy side. I glimpsed something white behind the blood and realised it was my bone. My own skeleton.

  I was wrong. The edges of the cut were not straight. They were shredded, like minced meat. For a second everything went black. Unfortunately I did not faint. Not then. Instead, a violent nausea bubbled up into my throat and with the self-control worthy of a Russian gymnast I succeeded in holding back the vomit.

  Abruptly the aggressive hacking of the saw stopped. Valter had wrenched the plug from the wall. And at that exact moment I stopped too, as if the saw and I had been connected to the same socket.

  There was silence. An echoing silence.

  Valter took a step towards me. He stood too close, like he had poor social skills, and his breath hit my face in small minty puffs. He gulped and in his grey-blue eyes I could see alarm. Maybe even panic. It was something about the speed of his irises racing from side to side in tiny, hardly perceptible movements. A few seconds passed as we stood like that, our eye
s locked together.

  Then there was a noise, a drawn-out whimper. Simultaneously Valter and I looked down at the floor. There was Enzo. It was like someone had paused a frame in a horror movie. The saw was less than ten centimetres from his right ear. He had blood on his cheek and in his hair, and splashes of blood on his goggles. My blood. His brown eyes were staring and his mouth was gaping as if he was about to scream but had been distracted. I noticed the zip of his flies wasn’t done up properly.

  Suddenly there was the sound of tentative footsteps and electronic clicking. I looked quickly over my shoulder and a blinding bluish-white flash went off right in my face.

  Click.

  It was Simon. Naturally it was Simon. He moved his mobile closer to my hand.

  Click.

  Then he pointed it at the floor and Enzo.

  Click.

  The blood, the goggles, his flies. Everything was illuminated by that deadly flash.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Self-consciously Enzo shut his mouth. He cleared his throat. From his humiliating position on the floor he said:

  ‘Stick your thumb in … in your mouth. The tip of your thumb, I mean. That’ll make it easier to sew it back on, that’s … that’s what I’ve heard.’

  Everything started spinning. I heard the click and his voice like an echo, but weirdly distorted:

  Click. Stick your thumb in … in your mouth.

  I fell backwards and my head hit something hard.

  Click.

  It was a merciful release when everything went black.

  Status: Sawn-off Thumb

  ‘Right,’ said Dr Levin, leaning over her desk and fixing me with her eyes. They were blood-shot and framed in layer upon layer of black mascara, which glued her eyelashes together in clumps of spiky spiders’ legs. She had a small graze on her nose and I thought that she must have fallen over, that perhaps she was an alcoholic.

  ‘Well, we’ve almost finished. Now …’ The beautiful, dark-haired nurse, who was called Maryam according to her name badge, unintentionally interrupted Dr Levin by asking me to keep my hand still. She raised my arm and instinctively I pulled back, only to relax when I realised there was no pain. Gratefully I remembered the local anaesthetic. Maryam gave a smile revealing a fascinating amount of even teeth and gently placed a sort of thin net over the stitches and a compress on top of that. Then she wrapped a layer of wadding around my thumb.

  ‘To stop it getting bumped,’ she said.

  I nodded. I was finding it hard to stop staring at Maryam. Expertly she wound a narrow bandage around my wrist and thumb. Her hands were warm and dry. Dr Levin looked bored, her lower lip jutting out irritably and her eyes half closed, as if trying but failing to imagine she was somewhere else. She took a breath and was about to continue talking but looked first at me, then at Maryam, then back at me, to make sure she would not be interrupted again.

  ‘Any more questions?’

  I thought frantically. She made me nervous.

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Or, well …yes. What are you going to do with the thumb?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, um, what are you going to do with the actual … tip?’

  ‘Oh, that. Throw it away, of course,’ she said bluntly, looking down at her papers.

  ‘Throw it away?’ My voice rose to a falsetto.

  ‘Yes. You can’t do anything with it. You do understand that, I hope? It’s incredibly difficult to re-attach the tip of a thumb once it’s been sawn off and the edges are shredded. It would be a hell of a job stitching back nerves and blood vessels and all that sort of thing. We don’t go to that much trouble, quite frankly. Not for a tiny thumb tip you can manage without.’

  Shredded? Wasn’t there some nice medical term that wouldn’t make you want to projectile vomit?

  ‘It would have been much better if you had cut it off cleanly, with some pliars, say. A much cleaner wound. Much easier to stitch together.’

  I stared at her. She was unbelievable.

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind next time,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ She drummed her fingernails impatiently on her desk but didn’t bother waiting for my answer.

  ‘And the tip of your thumb was so full of splinters, dust, and God knows what else. I doubt you’d have been able to use it anyway, but that didn’t make the job any easier. Any more questions?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Right then,’ said Dr Levin.

  She spun her chair round so that her back was partially towards me and she started speaking into a microphone that looked like a pen.

  ‘This is Dr Marie-Louise Levin dictating an emergency visit by Maja Müller. Reason for visit, colon, sawn-off thumb tip.’

  She fell silent, cleared her throat, and looked over her shoulder at me. Maryam patted my arm and told me to come back on Monday for a check-up and to have the dressing changed. After ten days I could go to my local surgery and have the stitches removed. I nodded, my eyes still fixed on Dr Levin, who at that very moment began dictating again:

  ‘Background, colon, seventeen-year-old girl, comma, lives with her father in Örnsberg, comma, parents separated, full stop. Occupation, colon, student, full stop. First year of creative arts course, comma, art and design, comma, St Erik’s Sixth Form Collage, comma, Stockholm, full stop. Non-smoker, full stop. Basically non-drinker, full stop.’

  On the other hand I’ve dealt a lot of heroin, I thought, and couldn’t hold back a smile.

  She continued:

  ‘Current status, colon, the patient was sawing a shelf during a woodwork lesson, with an electric…’

  ‘It wasn’t woodwork.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Her voice was sharp. Her eyes narrowed. I imagined those spidery eyelashes breaking off in thick lumps and slowly crawling down over her cheeks.

  ‘It wasn’t woodwork. It was sculpture. A sculpture lesson.’

  ‘Why were you making a shelf, then?’

  ‘I … I was exempt, you could say. I’m not that keen on sculpture.’

  Dr Levin demonstratively picked up the microphone again:

  ‘The patient was making a shelf using an electric jigsaw during a sculpture lesson, full stop.’

  She stared at me. Those tired eyes seemed to look right through me and out the other side.

  ‘The saw slipped causing her to saw off the tip of her left thumb, full stop. Sawn-off left thumb, comma, approximately twenty-three, twenty-four millimetres from the IP joint, comma, approximately five millimetres missing, comma, a small piece of bone protruding, full stop. Visible nail damage, comma, joint not engaged by injury, full stop. No further damage, full stop. General condition, colon, patient appears to be in shock from pain and somewhat … detached.’

  She stopped abruptly.

  ‘I was going to cut out a flamingo,’ I said. ‘That was when the saw … slipped. I was going to cut the outline of a flamingo on the side piece.’

  She looked at me blankly.

  ‘You can go now,’ she said, and I nodded and stood up quickly, as if I had received an electric shock. I looked around. Maryam had left the room without me noticing.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, backing out through the door.

  She didn’t even look up. Was she going to have a drink after I left? Would she get out some tax-free vodka from her desk drawer and take a few swigs straight from the bottle? I shut the door. I would never know.

  I sat down in the waiting room, which was empty apart from a young black woman wearing big gold earrings. She stared at me, at my shirt and the dried blood that drop by drop had stained the front of my shirt and most of the sleeves.

  Outside it started to rain; thin small drops that fell sporadically against the glass. Detached, I thought. Is that what I am? Slightly detached?

  Valter walked past the waiting room three times before he discovered me.

  ‘So this is where you are!’ he said, breathlessly. He smelled of smoke. Not a normal cigarette but someth
ing spicier, more like incense.

  I didn’t say anything. It was kind of like obvious.

  He had put his T-shirt back on, the one he had wrapped around my thumb in the taxi a few hours earlier, and the blood stain on the front was an almost perfect circle. It looked as if he had been shot at close range. He sat down on the chair next to mine and I thought that was too close. There were thirty chairs in this waiting room and he had to sit ten centimetres away from me.

  The young woman with the earrings stared first at Valter and then at me. It must have looked totally bizarre, all that blood.

  ‘Bloody hell, what a day,’ he said, taking a small box of throat sweets out of his jacket pocket.

  I couldn’t disagree with him there.

  ‘I’ve phoned your dad, at least.’

  He shoved a throat sweet into his mouth and held out the packet. I shook my head.

  ‘I couldn’t get hold of your mum but I left a message.

  ‘Oh. What did you say?’

  My voice revealed a kind of eager desperation and I didn’t like it.

  ‘Um, what did I say? I said there had been an accident but everything was under control.’

  “Under control?” Was everything really “under control”?

  ‘I left my number so she could ring before she came here, in case you had already left. But she’ll probably phone you. Have you got your mobile switched on?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I couldn’t be bothered explaining that she wouldn’t be coming anyway. I wasn’t prepared to answer the probing questions that would no doubt follow.

  ‘Is Dad coming here?’

  ‘Yes, I guess he’ll be here in twenty.’

  ‘Minutes?’ I had no idea what I was doing. Of course he meant minutes. Every other unit of time would have been absurd. Valter gave a lopsided smile.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Minutes.’

  We sat there for a while, next to each other. It was a relief he had his T-shirt on. It had been hard not to stare at his chest when that carpet of light-brown curly hair was exposed. Judging from the looks of the A&E nurses, they felt the same. Dr Levin was the only person who had managed to look him in the eyes.