Jagannath

Miss Nyberg and I

It began with a faint, scraping noise on the balcony.

That’s how I think things began for you, anyway. For me, it started one late night in your room. It’s many years ago now, back when we were young. I was reminded of it because you mentioned that you’d planted sequoia. You did that when I rented a room in your apartment, and we snuck a plant into the flowerbed outside the house, and somehow it managed to take root in the stern Swedish soil. After twenty years, the tree had managed to dig its roots all the way down into the laundry room of an adjacent house.

It’s a Sunday in late February. We’re on the big red plush sofa that I love, but is so damned hard to get out of. You’ve made a tart apple crumble, almost no sugar, but extra crumble. We cover it in lakes of custard and talk about our aches and pains; my new hip joint, your sciatica, my novel, your exhibition. And about the sequoia on the balcony, about to slowly wake from winter sleep. And I realise I’ve never told you the story about Brown.

It was summer. You worked nights as an illustrator at a tabloid. We shared a landline phone. I woke up at dawn because I thought I heard it ringing. The phone was quiet when I opened the door to your room. But there was someone in the gloom, sitting on the wooden chest you used for a coffee table. It was a small, gnarled shape with a faint glimmer of eyes. In my half-sleeping state, it didn’t seem that odd.

When I woke up again, I wasn’t sure if I had actually been in your room that night. But the image of the creature on the coffee table stuck in my head. It turned into a short story that was never finished—I had trouble with the ending. It also felt a bit weird that a friend of mine was the main character. I could have changed her name, but it wouldn’t have been the same thing. I mean, the story was about you.

This also has to do with your penchant for strange plants. You weren’t very interested in growing boring, ordinary flowers. Possibly sweet pea, because they were so pretty. Other than that though, you preferred to order the most bizarre stuff you could find in the seed catalogue, some of it on general principle:

“Angel trumpets! They ought to be illegal. I’ll have to grow those.”

You liked mandrake and deadly nightshade for the same reason. (This was the year your project was to fill the balcony with poisonous plants.) And then there were the surprise bags you ordered and opened with glee: mixed, unlabelled seeds that could sprout into anything.

So when all this happened I reckon it was late March, when the snowdrops start to wilt and crocus stick their buds out of the ground, when gravel and salt still litter the streets. It was dusk, and the first blackbird warbled in the pine next to the building. You opened the balcony door to let some air in, and you wouldn’t have looked down at the sleeping flowerpots if it weren’t for that scraping noise. There was a very small creature between two of the pots, trying to escape attention by standing very still. It was shivering from the cold.

It was knotted and dusted with soil, knees and elbows worn shiny. It was perhaps four inches tall. It made no resistance as you bent down and picked it up, lifted it into the kitchen and put it down on the table. You looked at each other for a while. Then you said:

“Did I grow you?”

It nodded in reply.

It was seemingly a sexless creature, but thin and crooked as it was, it looked like an old man. You simply named him Brown, and you made a bed for him in a blue flowerpot in the kitchen window.

Brown either couldn’t speak or chose not to. He was a quiet presence who seemed content to sit among the plants in the kitchen window. He would climb down to sit on the kitchen table when you ate. He disappeared under the dirt in the blue flowerpot whenever you had visitors.

I wrote some stuff about how Brown seemed to have a personal relationship with each of the plants in your flat and on the balcony. He made his rounds every day, patting stems and leaves, sometimes just sitting still among the roots. In spring, little buds sprung out on his shoulders and elbows that bloomed in time for midsummer. During winter, he hibernated in the flowerpot.

I wrote about when you moved from Hökarängen to another suburb west of Stockholm, and how Brown almost died because the transition was so difficult. And there the text ended. I didn’t know what to write, how to make the story come together. Where would it end? Would Brown stay with you the rest of your life? Would he ever be discovered by someone else? If someone moved in with you, how would he be able to stay hidden? To answer all these questions I would have to invent your future life. Your career. Your travels. A partner, maybe more. This is easy enough with a fictitious person, but you were very real, and my friend. Who was I to decide what you would do for a living, what kind of people you would come to love? I ended up being so afraid of doing something wrong, as if I were about to force you into a literary arranged marriage, that I stopped writing in the middle of the move from Hökarängen and Brown’s imminent death.

We know now how things ended up, of course. Alice’s gentle siesta snores reach out into the living room. Your paintings cover the walls. Brown’s presence, I say, must have either gone unnoticed, or he’s become a family secret. Of course, I didn’t think you’d ever share your life with someone who couldn’t handle the existence of someone like Brown.

You’re still listening, uncharacteristically quiet. When I say these last things, you smile at me – that very Finnish smile that makes you look so much like your mother, slanted eyes almost disappearing into the folds of your face. You chortle at me.

“I know, I know,” I say. “But what the hell was I supposed to do? You of all people know I can’t stop making things up.”

You burst into laughter. You stand up and walk over to the window, where you lift an upside-down flowerpot. A tiny, gnarled creature lies curled up on a folded woollen sock. It seems to be asleep. I can see its tiny ribcage moving.

“Brown,” you say. “What a name.”