Magda
Peter was nervous and embarrassed. Nervous about showing me his house, embarrassed about not paying for the taxi which had just thrown us up right next to three certain mailboxes of internet fame. He hadn´t even thought about money, that the taxi had to be paid and that he had no money with him, until now. I liked it so much I was worried. What if I like his being helpless so much that I make him helpless? He has managed his life without me this far, remember that!
He apologized that his garden looked bad which I assure you all Swedish gardens do in early December. Unless there´s snow, and there wasn´t. His left arm was in a sling, all the broken bones were on the left side. The swellings in his face had gone down a bit but he had to be in quite a bit of pain. He never complained, though, and I sometimes felt bad about forgetting that he was hurting.
He showed me where he had hid his key that night he went running. Very clever, but I won´t tell you where. Classified information.
"Do you want to see my place or your flat first?" he asked. He still could not talk. He still wrote down everything on my little laptop.
"Your place." Of course I was curious about my flat, but I was even more curious about how Peter lived. My imagination had come up with a lot of different scenarios, from a total mess to clinically stark. The only thing that would surprise me was a very ordinary IKEA-catalogue home.
"I have had this house for five years," he said. "You are my first visitor." Behind the front door was a stairway. Blue, all shades of blue. Some stuffed birds. I thought about that world-famously unknown taxidermist and wondered if it was his work. A door to the right.
"That´s the bad flat," he said. "The floor is terribly ugly. I never go there." Next door was his apartment. The hall was a nondescript beige.
"I just pass through this area," he said. "It must not be too loud. The rooms can make their statements, but not the hall. And the kitchen...I must be able to cook all sorts of food there." The kitchen was to the right. It was homey, somewhat old-fashioned and not loud. Peter was unexpectedly loud, though. He made an AAAH-sound (in spite of his being unable to speak) and stared at something wrapped in plastic in the kitchen sink. He backed off, typing furiously;
"Please, please throw it away. It must have rotted now. Shit, I forgot. Please." Except he didn´t bother about punctuation, being upset. I corrected it afterwards. Can´t help it, teacher thing.
It was a slab of meat, and I suppose it had gone bad after several days of room temperature. I didn´t feel any bad smell, though, but obviously Peter did. I took out the meat and threw it in the garbage bin while Peter opened all windows.
"I could stand the corruption at the hospital because of the white shutters, but this was too much." he had written. White shutters?
"I´m so happy you were with me." he went on, "That would have been hard for me to deal with on my own." We had moved on to the next room, the one straight ahead from his entrance door. This room was full of fish tanks, and there was a waterbed in the middle of the room.
"Sometimes I like to sleep under the water," he said, "I love snorkeling and diving."
"Great," I said, "I always wanted to try that."
All his rooms made statements, as he said. They had a definite mood and he chose where to eat or sleep or listen to music or read or just hang around according to what he (for instance) would eat and his current mood. All this to make his chords harmonize and be bearable. The big room to the left was dominated by plants. Some furniture, but mainly plants. And air. A back door to a porch and his garden.
Upstairs he had a black room with hardly any light, like a soft nest and a hard room, black and metallic, with a drum kit. The last room was on old-fashioned library with old armchairs, dark brown furniture and the smell of old books. I loved it! There were beds in all the rooms except the library, including his glassed-in porch. There were several separate sections in the garden too, all with their own moods.
Peter
I felt ridiculously happy showing Magda around. She got it! And she meshed with every room, in different ways. I wanted to hug her, lick her face like a happy puppy. But all I did was to grin like an idiot and my throat made happy idiot-sounds I couldn´t stop.
"Time to look at your flat." I wrote. It was on the top floor too, next to the hard room. She looked like a bird-lady which inspects the nest a lovesick male has built, him hoping it is grand enough for her to move in. I did the male-bird part, hovering worriedly and pointing out the best features. There was some furniture and other things that didn´t fit in any of my rooms but I hadn´t wanted to throw away. First I was worried that she´d think it was messy but she asked if it was possible to loan some of the stuff, she didn´t have much.
"That means you want to live here!"
"Of course I do."
Sometimes it was very frustrating to not be able to talk. Now it was bloody frustrating to not be able to scream. I went to the hard room and played my drums (with one arm) for a while. Happy. Loud. Cinnamon.
Magda
He was just too cute when he showed off his rooms. Once he dared to believe that I loved the concept and how he had made it happen he was so heart-warmingly joyous I wanted to kiss him. I could see he worried that I wouldn´t like the flat, but what was there not to like? The overall impression was that of his kitchen - homey, slightly old-fashioned, neutral in a good way. A nice kitchen, a bedroom overlooking what he said was the prettiest part of the garden and a big living-room with a fireplace. In a good part of town. Dirt cheap. With Peter in the same house. Of course of course of course I wanted to live there.
Peter disappeared, and the sound of drums filled the house. He couldn´t play properly with all those broken bones, but he sure could make a lot of noise. He was good! I wished I played an instrument, but I didn´t. He was Keith Moon-furious in there but happy, which Keith never was. I liked it. I liked everything except that I was hungry. I had eaten like crap the last few days. I wanted to eat and I wanted to sleep. In a bed, not a chair, thank you. I had optimistically gotten rid of my own bed when I moved in with Roger, since we were supposed to live happily ever after. There were two beds in the flat, though, one too soft but the other one just fine. I wanted it, but I wanted food first.
"Feed me!" I sounded like Little Shop of Horrors and Peter was all contrite. He apologized for his thoughtlessness in not being able to read my thoughts and he apologized that he didn´t have anything good to feed me with. This while he in no time whipped out a pasta dish with a fantastic salmon sauce. I was allowed to help with tasks that were hard to do with one hand, like chopping onions.
He made a fuss about what sheets I would harmonize the best with. He ended up picking some brown sheets which apparently would go well with my dominant orange and create a chord conductive to a good night´s sleep. They did, I guess. I´m usually an early riser but now I didn´t wake up until eleven.
Peter
How is it possible to sleep that long? She slept and slept and slept. I wanted to go in there and look at her, but I knew I must not, that would be creepy. I kept reminding myself that it was her flat, and that I could not just go in there. I had woken very early, excited like a kid on Christmas eve - which is when the gifts are exchanged in Sweden. Every day with her was a gift and I wanted to open my present as soon as possible.
While waiting I took care of my poor plants. Good thing it was this time of year. Six days with no water would have been worse in the summer, when they were much thirstier. But they were gloomy. They are always depressed in winter. I like the dark but they don´t, and this time of year there was about six hours of daylight. If you had a daytime job you only saw the light of day through the windows at work. As did my plants, sighing wistfully while doing their job of sending me smells and color. In summer I let them come out and play now and then but now it´s too cold.
Work. Magda would be back at work on Sunday. Gave me quite a start when I realized she was a teacher. School wasn´t the happiest time of my life. I suppose I can´t blame the teachers for not understanding me. No one did, after all, including me. But I wished that some of my teachers had been less certain about their erroneous explanations - like I was deliberately wrong-headed, stupid or acting the fool to get attention. But I was sure that Magda was not like that.
So. Plants taken care of. She still slept. I went down in the basement to clean the laundry-room. Check, as good as I can get it with one arm. Still no Magda. I went to the neighborhood bakery, it won´t do with stale bread for breakfast. She slept.
"Shit!" I said. Yes - I said it. Maybe I could speak again. I started to try out different sounds. Some vowels were easier than others, but I could speak after a fashion. It was still slow and clumsy, but better than writing. Now, at last, Magda turned up.
"Good morning." I said proudly. She was even more beautiful when rested. There was a feel of a field of oats, golden and rippling in the wind which sounds hyper-corny but that´s not my fault. The black eye was almost not noticeable now. At least not in the two seconds I managed to look at her before looking away. Man, she was bright.
"Hey, he speaks!" she said. "Don´t overdo it, remember?"
"Right." I said. I wonder if she believed me when I said that I remembered. I didn´t remember getting any instructions whatsoever.
