A parallel dimension

The vacuum cleaner rolls onto the yellow Ikea rug in his son’s room, and the father calls out encouragingly, “You’ve made it look so nice,” when, for no apparent reason, the brain shifts into detailed memories of the football pitch at primary school.

Why, he cannot understand. The brain simply does it. Somewhere in the tangle of associations produced by Saturday cleaning, this place has been brought to the fore, found in a forgotten archive, examined at one of the conferences of the unconscious, and apparently there is reason here and now to return to the gravel, the goal frames of white painted wood, the feeling of a stitch across the chest, but above all the fence that frames the pitch in and the world outside it out.

On the other side are the gardens of detached houses. A parallel dimension, constructed in a way that makes it almost impossible for the children to comprehend. People probably exist there in ordinary life, living beside the most public of public places, wandering around the houses in slippers, slurping coffee and reading the newspaper, day after day, as anonymous to the pupils as neighbours in a residential complex, despite being only a few metres away. They might just as well have pitched a tent in central Stockholm.

The children speculate about the homeowners, some better informed than others, because some have been to the other side in pursuit of a stray ball, climbing the high fence when a teacher looked away and finding themselves in a stranger’s garden. Descending like an astronaut, urgently trying to retrieve the ball before some neighbouring creature caught sight of them and perhaps became angry about the intrusion, or the noise, or the kinds of things faceless adults might do to a child in the imagination.

Nobody has seen them. There is speculation that an elderly couple live there, but if that were true, surely they would be visible throughout the day, unless they were deliberately keeping out of sight. More likely they work office hours, but nobody knows and nobody will ever know. The children continue playing their matches, making noise during penalty shootouts and sending balls over the fence, while the neighbours continue being neighbours, unknown and permanently present, while the years drift onwards and the child becomes a father vacuuming another child’s room and is flung backwards and forwards through time, like a stray thought or ball.