by Helene Flood
“Goodnight,” he says, and then rolls over to his side of the bed.
Sometimes, in desperation, I’ve lost it. I’ve said, not yet, I’ve said, we never see each other anymore, can’t we just stay close for a moment? It’s worse, I’ve learned, to be rejected as directly as I am when I try to force him – Sara, I’m so tired, I’ve been working all day, I don’t have the energy, I just want to sleep. It’s better to take the crumbs he offers me, the minute or two, perhaps, for which he holds me, before easing me back over to my side. Sometimes, it’s O.K. Sometimes I’m almost satisfied. Other times it frightens me how little I’m willing to put up with, the pitifulness of it all.
My mobile beeps as I drum my fingers against the cover of the book beside the cup of coffee – it’s impossible to concentrate, so it lies there, unread.
On the move, Ronja writes, and then: I’ll meet you at the station!
It’s been almost a year since we last saw each other. I look at my watch – four hours and fifteen minutes left. The train gathers momentum, as if descending a never-ending mountain. We’ve signed up to be volunteers at the Nattjazz jazz festival, all four of us – three whole days at the festival doing simple tasks with no responsibility, spending time together, drinking beer and going to concerts. I’ve taken time off work. Sigurd was eager for me to go – a little too eager for the guilt-free mini-week at the university I’m granting him. Of course you should go, he said. Have a good time with the girls, party in moderation, haha, no, but seriously, have a really great time. And I intend to.
I see her before she sees me. She’s standing under the platform canopy, her gaze searching among the passengers streaming out of the train. Her hair is longer than I remember, hanging wild around her shoulders. She has a kind of infectious, nonchalant elegance that rubs off on anyone standing beside her; appended to Ronja, I’m someone who counts. She doesn’t see me, even though I’m waving, and I enjoy watching her look around as she stands there and waits – it’s me she’s waiting for – and I love the moment she catches sight of me. Now she lights up and waves, really waves, jumping up and down and shouting my name as loud as she can.
We hug one another.
“Sara, you hussy,” she says into my hair, “I’ve missed you, d’you know that?”
And I have to concentrate, so that I won’t start crying right there and then.
“Ronja, you tart,” I say, fighting to maintain my self-control. “Of course I do.”
Early morning, March 10: O.K., O.K.
What was that? I’m suddenly wide awake, lying with my eyes open in the darkened room, staring without anything on which to fix my gaze. Was that a sound? Was there something that woke me? Now there is only silence. I lie there for a few seconds, on full red alert. The house creaks; the wind blows outside. In the far distance I think I can hear the rattling of the train, but I’ve reached the point where I’m no longer sure whether I’m really hearing it – whether I’ve heard it so many times over the past few days while listening into the silence for Sigurd that now I’m simply imagining it.
But I hear nothing more. I grope for my mobile on the bedside table, check the time while trying not to look at the image of Theo, Sigurd and me with orange peel in our mouths. It says 02:43. O.K., then.
Then there’s a creak. Not the kind made by a wooden house in the wind. The kind of creaking when something moves – a clear, articulated squeak. I sit up. Turn on the light. Don’t know what I’m expecting to see, but my bedroom is bare, just as it was. My gaze dances uneasily from object to object: the rail hung with shirts, both Sigurd’s and mine, the chest of drawers, the window, his now eternally empty side of the bed, his bed-side table and mine, the ceiling light, the window again. Then I hear the footsteps. They’re above me. Crystal-clear steps; a rhythmic thudding. Someone is in the loft. Someone is walking around in Old Torp’s study. I hear them go out through the door, hear it close, and with a shudder I know that they’re standing on the landing.
Only the bedroom door separates me from whoever is up there. Lightning fast, without thinking, I jump out of bed. With a leap I’m over by the door, gripping the handle, pulling it towards me as hard as I can, holding the door closed with all my might. It’s silent up there and I count, one, two, whoever is up there has heard me, three, four, we’re waiting for each other, five, six, these hundredths of seconds in which I’m monitoring the intruder and the intruder is monitoring me, seven, eight, and then, as I count nine, the intruder makes his move. I hear the banging of his footsteps on the stairs, rushing step by step down to my floor. I brace myself against the door, hanging my entire body weight off the door handle with an ice-cold, paralysing feeling inside me – that this is it, this is life or death, just me and the stranger outside.
But the footsteps race past the bedroom door, down the stairs to the living room, down from the living room to the hallway on the ground floor, and then I hear the front door being opened, and no more.
With my pulse pounding as if it’s about to explode my eardrums, I wait, still holding on to the door handle with all my strength. He must have gone out, but what do I know, there may be others out there. I wait, quiet as a mouse, trying to hear through the rushing of the blood in my head – to determine whether there are strangers in my house.
Then I let go, throw myself towards the bedside table and pick up my mobile, reaching back; keeping one hand on the door handle I use the other, my left, to call the police.
“My name is Sara Lathus,” I say to the pleasant male voice that answers. “I live in Nordberg, and five minutes ago I woke up because there was someone in my house.”
*
It takes the police nine minutes to arrive, and I sit like this as I wait for them, one hand on the bedroom door handle, the other clutching my mobile.
“O.K.,” I say to myself to calm myself down, “O.K., O.K., O.K., O.K.”
I say nothing else; can’t think anything, either. Everything is pale and trembling and I periodically see the image that was burned into my cerebral cortex around a year ago on the day Sigurd and I came to visit Old Torp, and found him dead in the loft.
At long last I hear them.
“Hello?” says a man’s voice from inside the house. “Hello, is there anyone here? We’re from the police.”
I wait, still quiet, O.K., O.K., let’s see how this goes.
“Hello?” another voice says. “We received an emergency call from this address.”
There’s a mumbling; I guess they’re speaking to each other, and then I hear them on the stairs to the living room, their voices a little louder.
“Hello? Are you here?”
And then, in a low voice:
“Do we actually know who we’re looking for?”
“A woman, her name is, let’s see . . .”
O.K., O.K. My pulse begins to slow. An emergency call.
“Sara?”
O.K., O.K.
“Yes,” I answer, my throat hoarse.
“Sara? Are you here?”
“I’m up here.”
“Can you come out?”
And so I let go of the door. My hands are shaking from the strain. I get up, and stagger out on chattering knees, through the door that has saved me.
The policemen are kind. They’re both young. One speaks in a soft, refined Kristiansand dialect, which reminds me of the summers I spent in southern Norway as a child; the other is Asian in appearance, at a guess I’d say his parents are from Pakistan. He’s attractive, with big, brown eyes and a small scar on one cheek. It is he who interviews me.
“When did you first hear the sounds?”
“I woke with a start,” I say. “I looked at the clock, it was 2.43.”
He nods; notes this down.
“And can you describe the sounds?”
His colleague is taking a look around as we speak. He goes across to the terrace door and pulls on the handle; checks that the windows are closed.
“It was footsteps,” I say, “I’m s
ure of it. He was up in the loft. He went out onto the landing and stood there while I sat in the bedroom holding the door closed, and then he ran down the stairs and out of the house.”
The policeman makes some notes.
“Are there any entrances to the house other than the front door where we came in and the veranda?” his colleague says.
“One at the back of the kitchen, into the laundry room,” I say, pointing, and he disappears.
“Have you had any break-ins before?” the policeman interviewing me says, and for a moment it’s as if everything stands still, and I think, he doesn’t know, he really hasn’t heard, and now I’m going to have to tell him.
“Well,” I say, “my husband was found murdered in Krokskogen on Sunday.”
His eyes widen, understanding spreading within them.
“So that’s not exactly another break-in,” I say, “but I’m sure you’ll understand why I’m a little jumpy.”
“Certainly,” he says. “Yes, of course, just give me a moment.”
He disappears off towards the laundry room in search of his colleague. I stay where I am, gazing after them. Alone in the living room, I look around. They’re only in the other room, but I miss them already, it feels lively and crowded when they’re in here. I wonder whether I can ask them to stay. Just the thought of having to go back to bed, alone up there in the bedroom, frightens me.
The policemen go upstairs, to where the intruder came from, up in Old Torp’s loft. I’m suddenly talkative, telling them all about Old Torp, describing how I found him, but I don’t follow them upstairs. Instead, I move across to the window. From our living room we have a view of the Oslo skyline – it’s one of the property’s big selling points.
There are lights everywhere down there, tiny dots. Street lights, office premises in which the lights are left on, squandering our communal electricity. Then there’s the buses, snack bars, bakeries and newspaper offices where people are always awake, I imagine, and the lonely wretches who can’t sleep. I wonder for how many of them this is just an average night. I want to ally myself with them.
The policemen come back downstairs.
“Well,” says the one with the Kristiansand accent, “we’ve searched the loft and checked all the exits, and there seems to be no sign of a break-in.”
“Are you sure you locked the front door last night?”
“Yes,” I say.
I go back over it in my mind – did I? Can I be sure that I remember locking the door yesterday, that I’m not confusing it with the evening before? Can my nerves have been so frayed that I forgot?
“Absolutely sure?”
I do a quick assessment.
“Ninety-five per cent,” I say.
They exchange glances.
“The front door was open when we arrived,” the police-man continues. “So it’s impossible for us to know, but he might have come in through an open window that he closed after him.”
I nod, waiting. Do they have any other theories?
“And if not, there are two possibilities,” the colleague says. “Either he managed to sneak in during the day, if you had the door unlocked at any point. Or he had a key.”
“Is there anyone other than you who has a key?” the policeman from Kristiansand says.
“My husband had one,” I say with a sigh – Sigurd had one, but he no longer exists. “But his was found on him, or with him, so the investigators working on the case must have it. Other than that, his mother has a key.”
They nod.
“Might it have been her?” one of them says.
“No,” I say, “no, I can’t imagine her ever coming in like that, going around my house and then running.”
“Well, she has just lost her son,” the policeman of Asian descent says. “Perhaps she’s in shock. Maybe she wanted something of his?”
I’m not sure how to respond to this. I think of Margrethe, as she was yesterday, tragically beautiful and a little drunk.
“Call her in the morning,” the policeman with the Kristian-sand accent suggests, “and find out whether she still has a key. Someone may have taken it from her.”
Something in his tone tells me they’re about to finish up.
“What happens now?” I say. They look at me, then each other, and back at me again.
“We’ll write up a report,” the policeman with the scar says, “and pass it on to the detective in charge of your case. The case involving your husband, I mean.”
They look at me again, and I feel the panic surge from my chest, they don’t understand, they’re about to leave.
“I mean,” I say, “what happens to me? Are you, I don’t know, are you just going to leave me? Am I supposed to stay here?”
The policeman from Kristiansand stares at his hands. I look at them, too. They’re covered in dense, fair hair.
“If you’ll feel uncomfortable staying here,” he says, “you can always go and stay with someone you know.”
Annika, Pappa, Margrethe. The list isn’t long. Annika would be happy to have me, but I don’t know, I feel reluctant. This is where I live. This is my house. And it’s illogical, but regardless – if Sigurd were to come home looking for me, this is where he would come.
Do I really think that? Do I believe it? Am I starting to lose my mind? I hear the voice of the eminent Gundersen: “The forensics report is due on Tuesday.” Hear him saying, “Sara, don’t doubt it.” Well, Gundersen, I’m afraid I do. The forensics report hasn’t been completed yet – there’s still the tiniest morsel of possibility that it may be someone else. What that would mean, I have no idea, but I know that I want to be here should Sigurd turn up.
“I want to stay here,” I say. “I live here. I mean, why should I move?”
“Well,” the other policeman says, and something in his tone tells me he’s starting to tire of me, “that’s naturally up to you to decide.”
“Is there any reason to believe the intruder may come back?” the southerner with the hairy hands says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no idea why he was here in the first place.”
When the policemen leave I let myself into my office, carrying a duvet under one arm and a pillow under the other. In my left hand, I hold the keys. In my right, I hold the sharpest kitchen knife I own.
It’s cosier in here, safer. Only I have a key to the office – not even Sigurd has an extra key. I lock the front door, then lock the door between the waiting room and my office. Then I drag my desk over to the door and push my office chair beneath it. If anyone tries to get in, it will at the very least wake me up. I lie down on the floor with the duvet, it’s hard and painful, but I don’t expect to sleep much tonight anyway. In my hand, I hold the knife.
Here’s what I remember from the days at the Nattjazz festival that year:
An electric, almost compulsive first evening; Benedicte, Ronja, Ida and I sitting at Verftet, we have a table, people we know come up to us, we hug people here and there and I say, “Hi, how’s it going?” to loads of old acquaintances I’d forgotten I had. I’m being too intense, I realise, so I try to hold back – to relax and take the good atmosphere as a given – but I can’t, I’m too desperate, and so to camouflage this I drink too much. I’m staying with Benedicte, and she has to come home with me before the party is over. I throw up in the bushes of her neighbour’s garden.
The sandwiches we make as part of the festival kitchen team: saveloy sausage, butter and rocket, or cheese, butter and grapes, for the volunteers. The artists are given nicer packed lunches. There are four of us on the shift: an emo girl from Sauda with black eyeliner, who hardly says anything; a literature student who’s writing her bachelor’s dissertation on Proust, but who is also surprisingly funny, “In Search of the Lost Cheese Slicer,” she says over the sandwiches; and a shy engineer who pretends to follow what we’re saying when we speak Norwegian, but who only thaws out when we switch to English. I’m funny, too. I can tell the others think so. I tell stories from
my life, from my practical training, from Oslo, about my father. I share too much. Not just from my work – which is ethically problematic – but too much of the rest, as well. Not that I’m telling everyone what an awful time I’m having, but I reveal so much that’s personal. I make fun of my father. “I don’t think I’ve read any Zinerman,” says the literature student, and I say, believe me, if you had you’d remember – my father likes to shock his way into people’s memories.
Backstage we organise what the artists have asked for – food, T-shirts, whatever’s on their rider. The Italian engineer, Massimo, and I have a slightly embarrassing moment over a stack of porn magazines an American progjazz band have requested. Massimo blushes easily, and I find him sweet because of it.
The mornings spent at home with Benedicte. When her partner has left for work, she and I eat big, fatty cheese sandwiches and drink litres of coffee from the ceramic mugs she took with her from the apartment we shared while we watch comedy series on D.V.D., and everything is just as it used to be.
The odour of stale beer on the premises when we arrive in the afternoons, the smell of sweat, of the party, of the people from the night before which still hangs in the air, in the heavy black stage curtains. Those curtains smell of things I can only imagine, things that are fun and borderline illegal, maybe drugs, maybe sex.
A concert with an old Dominican artist who takes off his shirt on stage; he throws it into the audience and Ronja catches it and holds it up, it’s white with blue flowers on it and we look up at it, both of us, and laugh, and in that moment I think, I’m never going back, here I am free, fuck Sigurd and everyone else in the grey concrete slab of a city that is Oslo.
The last night of the festival, when all the volunteers celebrate together. Ronja has snagged the festival flirt, I’ve drunk Turkish shots with the kitchen team, and some of the people who’ve worked at the festival for years – the enthusiasts behind it – get up to play. None of them are professionals, but they make up for this with their passion for the music, and it’s almost beautiful when they slide into an old Billie Holiday song: “All of me, why not take all of me, don’t you know I’m no good without you.” Massimo takes my hand. I smile at him – am about to say, I’m sorry, I have a boyfriend. But then I don’t. It’s as if I’m twenty-two years old and a student again. I think, don’t I deserve just one night when I can be that person again? Here Sigurd doesn’t exist, and if he doesn’t exist, I don’t live in Oslo, and therefore I’m not the girl who cries behind books on the train and pretends to be asleep when her boyfriend comes home. So I stand there and hold Massimo’s hand for ten minutes. Then he places his other hand at the small of my back. Then he kisses my ear. Then he looks at me with his kind, brown eyes, and I think, why the fuck not? I’ve had a bit to drink, but that’s not why. I’m clear-headed enough to think: we have to go now, before I change my mind, before I manage to be sensible. I drag him out of the main auditorium and into one of the band rooms I know is empty.