The Gilded Cage

In early July my landlady, a retired teacher, went off to visit her grandchildren in Norrland.

‘No visitors,’ she said sternly before she left.

‘No visitors,’ I repeated obediently.

That evening I put my make-up on and drank her gin and whisky. Cherry liqueur and Amarula. It tasted disgusting, but that didn’t matter, I wanted to feel that rush, the rush that promised the bliss of forgetting and spread through my body like a warm glow.

When I had drunk enough to feel brave, I put on a cotton dress and walked to Stureplan. After a bit of hesitation, I sat down at a pavement bar that looked nice. Famous faces I had only ever seen on television walked past. Laughing, intoxicated by both alcohol and the summer.

At midnight I got in the queue outside a nightclub on the other side of the street. The atmosphere was impatient and I wasn’t sure if they’d let me in. I tried to imitate the others, act like them. It was only later that I realized they must have been tourists too. As lost as I was, but with courage painted on.

I heard laughter behind me. Two guys the same age as me walked past the queue and went up to the bouncers. A nod and a handshake. Everyone was staring at them with jealousy and fascination. Hours of preparation and giggling over glasses of rosé, only to end up shivering behind a rope. When it could all be so simple. If only we had been someone.

Unlike me, these two guys were people who got noticed, they were respected, they belonged. They were Someone. There and then I decided the same thing was going to apply to me.

At that moment one of the guys turned and looked curiously at the crowd. Our eyes met.

I turned away and felt in my bag for a cigarette. I didn’t want to look stupid, didn’t want to look like what I was – a girl from the country on her first trip to a nightclub in the big city, giddy with stolen gin and Amarula. The next thing I knew, he was standing in front of me. His hair was shaved, his eyes blue, kind. His ears stuck out slightly. He was wearing a beige shirt and dark jeans.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Matilda,’ I replied.

The name I hated. The name that belonged to another life, another person. Someone who was no longer me. Someone I had left behind when I got on the train to Stockholm.

‘I’m Viktor. Are you here on your own?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Go up and stand next to the bouncer,’ he said.

‘I’m not on the list,’ I mumbled.

‘Nor am I.’

A sparkling smile. I pushed my way out of the queue, the object of envious, longing stares from girls in too few clothes and boys with too much hair gel.

‘She’s with me.’

The meat-mountain by the door removed the rope and said: ‘Welcome.’

In the crowd Viktor took my hand, leading me deeper into the darkness. Other people’s shadows, flickering lights, all different colours, throbbing bass, entwined bodies dancing. We stopped at the end of a long bar and Viktor said hello to the bartender.

‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked.

With the cloying taste of sickly liqueur still in my mouth, I said: ‘Beer.’

‘Good, I like girls who drink beer. Class.’

‘Class?’

‘Yeah. Good. Solid.’

He handed me a Heineken. Raised the bottle in a toast. I smiled at him and drank some.

‘So, what dreams have you got for your life, Matilda?’

‘To be someone,’ I replied. Without pausing to think.

‘You’re already someone, aren’t you?’

‘Someone else.’

‘I can’t see that there’s much wrong with you.’

Viktor took a few sideways dance-steps, swaying in time to the music.

‘So what are your dreams?’ I asked.

‘Me? I just want to make music.’

‘Are you a musician?’ I had to lean closer and raise my voice for him to hear me.

‘DJ. But I’m not working tonight. I’m playing tomorrow, I’ll be up there then.’

I followed his finger. On a small stage over by the wall, behind a record-player, stood the guy Viktor had arrived with, grooving to the music. A little while later he came over to us, and introduced himself as Axel. He seemed nice, unthreatening.

‘Good to meet you, Matilda,’ he said, holding out his hand.

I couldn’t help thinking how different they were from the guys back home. Polished. Well-spoken. Axel got a drink, then disappeared. Viktor and I drank another toast. My beer was almost finished.

‘We’re warming up beforehand with a few friends tomorrow, if you fancy coming along?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, looking at him thoughtfully. ‘Why did you want me to come in with you?’

I drank the last of my beer demonstratively, hoping he’d order more. He did. One for me, one for him. Then he answered my question. His blue eyes glinted in the dim light.

‘Because you’re pretty. And you looked lonely. Are you regretting it?’

‘No, not at all.’

He fished a packet of Marlboros from his back pocket and offered me one. I had nothing against taking it, mine would last longer that way. There wasn’t much left from the fifteen thousand I’d got from the sale of the house once the mortgage and everything else had been paid off.

Our hands touched as he lit my cigarette. His hand was warm and tanned. I missed his touch the moment it was gone.

‘You’ve got sad eyes. Did you know that?’ he said, sucking hard on his cigarette.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There seems to be some sort of sadness in you. I find that attractive. I’m suspicious of people who go round thinking life’s a barrel of laughs the whole time. Life is fun. But not all the time. People who are always happy bore me. We’re not supposed to be happy all the time, because then the world would stop.’

One of the bouncers was staring pointedly at Viktor, and he shrugged and stubbed his cigarette out after a few quick puffs. I did the same. But I didn’t answer. I had a feeling he was making fun of me.

Suddenly my head started to spin from all the drink. I decided to get a souvenir, leaned forward, put my hand on the back of his head and pulled his face towards mine. A gesture that must have made me seem far more confident than I was. Our lips met. He tasted of beer and Marlboro, and he was a good kisser. Gentle but intense.

‘Shall we go back to mine?’ he asked.

Jack was sitting at the kitchen table in his dark-blue dressing-gown reading Dagens Industri. He didn’t even look up when Faye came into the kitchen, but she was used to that when he was feeling stressed. And considering all the responsibilities of his work and all the hours he spent in the office, he deserved to be left in peace in the morning at the weekend.

The four-hundred square-metre apartment, the result of knocking four smaller flats into one, felt claustrophobic when Jack needed to be left alone. Faye still didn’t know how to behave on days like that.

In the car on the way home from Lidingö, where Julienne had gone to play with a friend from preschool, she had been looking forward to spending the morning with Jack. Just the two of them. Curl up in bed, watch a television programme that they would both declare stupid and vulgar. Jack would tell her about his week. They’d go for a walk on Djurgården, hand in hand.

Talk, the way they used to.

She cleared away the remains of her and Julienne’s breakfast. The cornflakes had gone soggy in the soured milk. She hated the texture of wet cereal and the sour smell, and swallowed the instinct to gag as she wiped them off with a cloth.

There were breadcrumbs on the island unit, and a half-eaten sandwich was balancing on the edge, defying the laws of gravity. The only thing holding it up was the fact that it was lying face-down.

‘Can’t you at least try to clear up before you go out?’ Jack said without looking up from his newspaper. ‘Surely we shouldn’t need help with the housework at weekends as well?’

‘Sorry.’ Faye swallowed the lump in her throat as she wiped the counter with a cloth. ‘Julienne wanted to get going. She was making such a fuss.’

Jack murmured and went on reading. He was freshly showered after his run. He smelled good, Armani Code, the cologne he had used since before they met. Julienne had been disappointed not to see her dad, but he had gone out running before she woke up, and didn’t come back until Faye had left with her. It had been a difficult morning. None of the four breakfast options Faye had given Julienne had been acceptable, and getting her dressed had been a painful, sweaty marathon.

But at least the kitchen worktop was clean now. The aftermath of the war had been cleared away.

Faye put the dishcloth in the drainer and looked at Jack, sitting there at the kitchen table. Even though he was tall, fit, responsible, prosperous – all the classic attributes of a successful man – he remained a boy in many ways. She was the only person who saw him for what he was.

Faye would always love him, no matter what.

‘It’ll soon be time for a haircut, darling.’

She reached out one hand and managed to touch a few locks of his damp hair before he jerked his head away.

‘I haven’t got time. This expansion is complicated, I need to stay focused. I can’t keep running to have my hair cut every five minutes like you.’

Faye sat down on the chair next to him. Put her hands on her lap. Tried to remember when she had last had her hair cut.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘About what?’

‘Compare.’

Very slowly, he looked up at Faye from the newspaper. He shook his head and sighed. She regretted saying anything. Regretted she hadn’t carried on wiping crumbs from the worktop. Nonetheless, she took a deep breath.

‘Before, you used to like—’

Jack flinched and lowered the newspaper. His fringe, a few millimetres too long, fell across his face and he jerked his head irritably. Why couldn’t she let him be? Just carry on with the cleaning. Be thin and beautiful and supportive. He had been at work all week. If she knew him right, he’d soon shut himself away in the tower room and carry on working. For her and Julienne’s sake. So that they could have a good life. Because that was their goal. Not his. Theirs.

‘What good would talking about it do? You don’t know anything about business any more, do you? It’s a perishable product. You can’t rely on what you used to know.’

Faye fingered her wedding ring. Twisted it round, round.

If she hadn’t said anything, they could have had the morning she had been dreaming of. But she had thrown all that away with one stupid question. When she already knew better.

‘Do you even know the name of the current Swedish Business Minister?’ he said.

‘Mikael Damberg,’ she replied without thinking. Immediately and correctly.

She regretted it when she saw the look on Jack’s face. Why couldn’t she just keep quiet?

‘OK. A new law is about to come into force. Do you know what it is?’

She knew. But she shook her head slowly.

‘No, of course you don’t,’ Jack said. ‘It stipulates that we as a company have to remind our customers one month before their subscriptions expire. Before, things would renew automatically. Do you understand what that means?’

She knew all right. She could have given him a systematic breakdown of what it meant for Compare. But she loved him. She sat there in her million-kronor kitchen, with her husband who was a boy in a man’s body, a man only she knew, and who she loved above all else. And she shook her head. Instead of saying that Leasando Limited, a small electricity supplier owned by Compare, would lose approximately 20 per cent of those customers whose contracts would have been renewed automatically in the past. In round figures, that meant turnover would shrink by five hundred million a year. And profits by two hundred million.

She shook her head.

Fingered her wedding ring.

‘You don’t know,’ Jack said after a long pause. ‘Can you let me read now?’

He raised the newspaper. Went back to the world of numbers, stock valuations, share issues and company takeovers that she had spent three years studying at the Stockholm School of Economics before she had quit. For Jack’s sake. For the business’s sake. For their family’s sake.

She rinsed the dishcloth under the tap, then scooped up the soggy cornflakes and crumbs from the drainer with her hand and threw them in the bin. She heard the rustle of Jack’s newspaper behind her back. She shut the bin-lid quietly so as not to disturb him.

Stockholm, summer 2001

Viktor Blom had a pale-brown birthmark on the back of his neck, and his broad back was very suntanned. He was sleeping soundly, giving me all the time in the world to look at both him and the room we were lying in. The windows had no curtains, and apart from the double bed the only furniture was a chair covered with dirty clothes. The sun was forming prisms that danced across the white walls.

My naked legs were wrapped in a damp, dirty sheet. I kicked it off, then wrapped it around me like a towel and carefully opened the bedroom door. The sparsely furnished maisonette that Viktor and Axel were renting for the summer occupied the first two floors of a block on Brantingsgatan in Gärdet. There was a small garden outside, with a table, some wooden chairs and a black domed barbecue. There was an empty Fanta can on the table, crammed with cigarette butts.

The sound of loud snoring was coming from Axel’s room. The living room and kitchen were on the ground floor, so I went downstairs, made coffee and unearthed my cigarettes from my bag, which lay discarded on the hall floor. Then I went outside with my coffee and cigarettes and sat on a chair in the garden.

Tessin Park lay spread out before me. The sun was low in the sky, making me squint.

I didn’t want to be clingy and annoying. That business of Viktor saying he’d like me to come to their party was probably just talk. To get me into bed. I’d heard far grander promises in bars in the past. Viktor seemed to have had fun with me. I’d certainly had fun with him. But it was best to leave it at that. I stubbed the cigarette out in the Fanta can and stood up to go and find my clothes. Then the door opened behind me.

‘There you are,’ Viktor said sleepily. ‘Have you got a cigarette?’

I passed him one. He sat down on the chair I had been sitting in and blinked in the sunlight. I sat down next to him.

‘I was about to go,’ I said.

I was expecting to see a look of relief on his face. Gratitude that I wasn’t going to be one of those clingy girls, the sort who didn’t understand when it was time to leave.

But Viktor surprised me.

‘Go?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t live here, do I?’

‘So?’

‘You and Axel won’t want me hanging about here, will you? I get that it was a one-off and you’ve got your own stuff to do. I don’t want to be the annoying girl who doesn’t know when it’s time to leave.’

Viktor looked away and gazed out across Tessin Park. I resisted the urge to stroke the stubble on his shaved head. There was a photograph in the bedroom that showed him with thick, curly fair hair. He sat there in silence and for a while I thought I had seen through him. That he was as easy to read as every other guy.

Eventually he said:

‘I don’t know how guys usually treat you, what things are like where you come from, but I think you’re great. You’re different, genuine. Obviously you can leave if you want to, but I’d really like it if you stayed for a while. I thought I’d go and get us some juice and croissants from the 7-Eleven, then do a bit of sunbathing and order a pizza.’

‘OK.’ My answer came without me having time to think about it.

A wasp flew past my face. I waved it away, although I’d never been frightened of wasps. There were far worse things to be frightened of.

‘“OK”? Seriously, what kind of guys do you normally hook up with?’

‘Back home the guys are … I don’t know. They usually want you to have sex and then leave, pretty much. They have their own stuff to be getting on with the next day.’

I didn’t mention the way they looked at you. The things they said. The shame I had to carry, even though it belonged to someone else. Giving my body to someone who wanted it counted as nothing compared to all the rest of it.

Viktor shaded his eyes with his hand.

‘How long have you lived in Stockholm?’

‘One month.’

‘Welcome.’

‘Thanks.’

Around seven o’clock people started to show up in the flat. Most of them were a few years older than me, and I felt a bit out of place at first. Viktor disappeared in the crowd and I ended up by the table in the garden with Axel. I sipped a drink and smoked while he told stories that made me roar with laughter, about his Interrail trip with Viktor the previous summer. Two girls came out, and introduced themselves as Julia and Sara. Julia had long brown hair, green eyes, and was wearing a beautiful, dark-blue dress. Sara had a denim skirt, white vest and her blonde hair was pulled into a loose knot.

‘I’m so fucking stressed about the autumn,’ Julia said, leaning forward. ‘I want to give up, or at least take a year’s sabbatical, but Dad won’t let me. He loses it whenever I try to raise the subject. God, I hate Lund.’

‘You poor thing,’ Sara said, blowing smoke-rings.

‘I wish I’d had the grades to get into the School of Economics instead. But what the hell – let’s forget all that and have some fun tonight.’

Julia straightened up and looked at me as if she’d only just noticed I was there.

‘What do you do?’

I cleared my throat. Blew out some smoke. I had no inclination to discuss my plans for the future with someone I’d known all of five minutes.

‘I’m not doing much at the moment.’

‘That sounds good. You want to be a student?’

I had applied to various colleges in Stockholm, so I nodded. And thought about my bank account, which was starting to look alarmingly empty.

‘I’m thinking about it. But it’s a while before they let you know,’ I said.

‘How do you know Axel?’

This from the other girl, Sara, nodding in his direction.

‘I met Viktor, if you know him, at Buddha Bar yesterday.’

‘Did you sleep here?’

I nodded.

They finished their cigarettes in silence before getting to their feet.

‘Julia used to go out with Viktor,’ Axel said once they had gone.

‘Used to?’

‘Until about three months ago, something like that. This is the first time they’ve met since she got home from Lund.’

Julia and Sara came along to Buddha Bar. They stuck close to Viktor and kept glaring sullenly at me. The more alcohol I got inside me, the more irritated I became.

Viktor took a break from his decks and came over to me and Axel. I put my arms round him as I met Julia’s narrowed eyes. He kissed me and I bit his bottom lip gently. When it was time for him to go back to the DJ’s booth he asked if I wanted to go with him. He led me through the crowd with his arm round my waist. It took a while because people kept stopping him to talk. We got there in the end. Viktor put his headphones on, adjusted some controls and started to sway in time to the music.

I did the same. Then I took one of his hands, slipped it under my dress and put it between my legs. I wasn’t wearing any underpants.

‘Do you want to come back to mine tonight?’ he asked.

‘Yes. If you’d like me to?’

He gave me an intense look that made any spoken answer unnecessary.

‘What are we going to do?’ I teased.

Viktor laughed and changed track.

It was a wonderful feeling. I was free. Free to do whatever I wanted. To be whoever I wanted. Without the past messing up everything around me, inside me. Without all the people who had been pulling me down. I was slowly turning myself into someone else, little by little.

I looked out across the dancing throng, shut my eyes and thought about what life was like in Fjällbacka. All the curious glances that followed me wherever I went, the mixture of fascination and sympathy, sticky, heavy, suffocating. No one knew here. No one stared here. My place was here. In Stockholm.

‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ I yelled.

‘OK. I finish in ten minutes. Shall we meet up by the door?’

I nodded and made my way to the lavatory. I stood in the queue, smiling to myself about the fact that Viktor belonged to me, no one else. The music from the dance-floor thudded in the distance, making the mirror on the wall vibrate.

I looked at my reflection. My hair was blonder than usual, and I felt tanned and fresh. I thought I looked older than I had only a few weeks ago. By the basins a girl aimed a pink can of hairspray at her head. The sweet scent caught in my nose, a refreshing contrast to the smell of sweat, drink and smoky clothes.

The door opened behind me and the music got briefly louder.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned round. I caught sight of Julia before the drink came flying at me. An ice-cube hit me on the forehead, fell to the floor and bounced away. My eyes stung and I blinked hard with surprise and pain.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I shouted, stepping back.

‘You little slut,’ Julia said before turning on her heel and stalking out.

Some other girls laughed. I wiped myself with a paper towel. I felt the humiliation like insects crawling inside me. I felt like my old self again. The one who shrank away and hid in the shadows. The one who cowered under the weight of far too many secrets.

Then I straightened up and looked at myself in the mirror. Never again.

One week later I got a letter. I had been accepted to do an MBA at the Stockholm School of Economics. I got a copy of the letter, found out what Julia’s address was, bought an envelope, and put the copy of the letter inside with a Polaroid photograph Viktor had taken, of me on all fours and Viktor behind me, his face contorted with pleasure. When I dropped the envelope in Julia’s family’s letterbox I had only one thought in my head. I was never going to let anyone humiliate me again.

One month later I registered at the School of Economics under my middle name, Faye, after the author of my mum’s favourite book. Matilda no longer existed.

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