The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  We were greeted by Gudrun and her husband, Per, who were about forty. “Velkommen til Norge,” they had said to Julia, and we had been ushered into the huge farm kitchen, where Reidun was supervising. We all shook hands, then she told us to go get a home-cured ham from the stabbur. “It’s her way of saying we’re family, not her landlord,” I explained to Julia on the way to the curing house.

  “But you own half the farm and don’t put in any labour.”

  “We also don’t take out any profit, which in some years is considerable. This farm is one of the prime spots for molte cultivation. But our side of the family, who owned the farm originally, moved to the city more than a hundred years ago. In return for half ownership and all the profits, Old Reidun’s father agreed to work the farm and keep up the seter for our use.”

  Even after so long, it worked well. The two sets of honorary cousins regarded each other warmly but with a shake of the head that said: They’re not like us.

  Middag eight days ago had passed pleasantly with fiery homemade redberry wine, trout, the ham, rømme, new potatoes and salad. We had left loaded down with fresh milk, cream, butter, eggs, bacon and bread. Gudrun promised to resupply us every three or four days.

  Julia, since we had been here, had eaten an astonishing amount. “It’s just so good,” she always said when she served herself seconds. We had walked, and napped, and eaten, and talked, and walked more, and now we bobbed about on the fjord because she hoped we could catch some perch.

  She slept on. I cast again, watched the lazy ripples. If I squinted, I could just make out the flowers growing in the sod roof of the old loft half a kilometer away on the east bank. The seter itself was hidden by an outcropping of the fjell that plunged straight into the fjord and formed its eastern bank. Beyond the fjell was Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in Europe. When the wind was right you could smell the almost chemical bite of the ice but today all that filled the air was the scent of Julia’s skin, like dusty, sun-warmed violets, and, even two kilometers beyond the bank, the pagan smell of the earth’s skin: millions of hectares of birch breaking into leaf at the same time. There was nothing like it; it woke parts of me that usually slept.

  “You look pleased with yourself.” Julia was awake and watching me, her eyes a startling, sheened blue against the green lake.

  “I’m breathing air like wine, I have money and good health, and I’m in a boat on green water with a beautiful woman. There’s nothing I can’t do.”

  She gave me a lopsided affectionate look. “Except catch fish.”

  I twitched at my line. Nothing.

  “Let me have a go.”

  We traded places carefully. She cast expertly.

  “Where did you learn how to do that?”

  “Massachusetts. Guy taught me.” Her mouth stretched in old grief and her eyes glittered. A bird sang from the woods far away on the west bank. Its call was heartbreakingly pure.

  I held out my arms and, careful of the rocking boat, she came to me.

  It never ceased to amaze me how she could feel as wild as a living hurricane one minute, and delicate, almost bird-boned, the next. I cradled her to me, felt her heart beating through her ribs. So fragile. I stroked her hair, over and over, and hummed a lullaby. Eventually she sat up and wiped her eyes.

  “It’s been nine years. I used to weep for him every day. It’s less often now, and sometimes there are days, even weeks, when I don’t think about him at all. Then I’ll think of my other brother, Drew, or Carmel, my sister, and I remember I’m the eldest now, and I feel…They live so far away now, but I feel so responsible for them. And then I miss him. Missing him is like a hole inside me, a gaping wound, wider than the hands of anyone who would try staunch the bleeding. A hole so big it could swallow the world.”

  “I have big hands.”

  “I know.” She tried a smile, and it worked pretty well. She took a deep breath and I could almost see her step aside from her grief and thrust it behind her. “There don’t seem to be any perch biting in this part of the lake.”

  “Then I’d better row you to another part.”

  It was good to bend my back to the oars, to watch the boat scooting over the fjord and see Julia laugh in delight at the miniature bow wave I managed to throw up.

  At some arbitrary spot that seemed no different from the one we’d left, she told me to stop. I shipped oars and watched her cast, and cast again. I lay back in the thwarts and listened to the sing and plop of the line.

  The sky teemed like the Serengeti: herds of cloud antelope, springbok, even rhino with cloud horns, racing in the same direction; with a bit of imagination I could make out a warthog and a line of anteaters trundling nose to tail. Farther down, a cautious tortoise couldn’t decide whether to creep north or south, and right at the horizon, three pearly gray porpoises seemed to leap from the water.

  “I don’t miss the Atlanta sky,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No. You get up in the morning and the sky is blue. Later in the day you glance up and it’s blue. While you eat dinner, you look out of the window and it’s…blue. There are occasional days when you get up and it’s blue, you eat lunch and it’s blue, but when you have dinner there’s a thunderstorm, and, admittedly, those skies are something, cloud as pink as an alligator’s mouth, that gorgeous violet around sunset if the storm is on its way, the occasional green flash of a transformer going out—taking the power with it, of course—and it’s nice to have the road freshly washed, but when you get up in the morning, it’s blue again. You can’t lie on your back and watch another world form and dissolve and dance minuets over your head. Unless you count contrails.”

  “Do you?”

  The cloud tortoise was slowly being ripped apart by its own indecision, or maybe some haematovirus of the African plains…. “Um?”

  “Do you count contrails?”

  “If they have had the time to evolve. Sometimes I think of planes as seeding the skies with new life….” We contemplated the clouds for a while.

  “It’s odd,” Julia said at last. “You talk about life so much, yet you’ve been around a lot of death. I asked you before why you did this, and you said it was because you’re Norwegian. So now I’ve seen Norway. It’s a land that doesn’t know compromise. It’s snow, ice and darkness in the winter; and endless midnight sun, bright meadow flower and sweet green grass for two months in the summer. Black or white. On or off. Yes or no. It explains some of the way you react to what life throws at you, the pragmatic immediacy, the readiness—you never forget that there are trolls in the hills. But it doesn’t explain why. Why you keep throwing yourself into the path of the pain in the world.”

  “No.”

  She waited.

  “The pain of the world doesn’t follow paths. It blunders all over the place. It ran smack into my bedroom, carrying a gun, when I was eighteen years old.” She waited again. “It’s a long story.”

  The antelope still galloped overhead, the dumpapers warbled, Julia seemed perfectly happy to sit there with that rod, waiting, until the Ice Age came again and we travelled around the world on a tongue of green ice. I sighed, and started at the beginning.

  “I was born in England, where my mother was a consular officer, and didn’t see Norway until I was two. The bit of English I spoke was a strange cross between the Chicago accent of my father and the south London of my nanny. We split our time between Oslo and Bergen until I was six, when we went back to the U.K. My mother was now an attaché. My father was busy with his business, flying back and forth between London and Chicago. I was either at school or up in Yorkshire, spending vacations with Lord Horley’s children. I hardly ever saw my mother but I learnt not to miss her. I learnt to expect her to be a long way off, a presence who always came on the important occasions—birthdays, Christmas, school sports days—but who moved to a holy schedule arranged long in advance and never to be interrupted.” The boat creaked as I leaned forward. “My mother is one of those people who always knows how
to act, how to dress, even how to do her hair. She never, ever looks out of place. She could be at a bonfire night party in an ancient Berber jacket, cutting up parkin and treacle toffee for my friends, pulling charred potatoes out of the fire embers with hair all tousled and nose just the right shade of red from the cold November air one day, and the next she would be in cashmere and pearls, hair in a chignon, taking tea with Lady Horley. Everyone thought she was a perfect mother. But we were strangers to each other. Perfectly polite, perfectly willing to try to be a model mother and daughter, but unsure how. I think it upset my father.”

  “Did it upset you?”

  “No. Not really. It’s just the way my world was.”

  “But you want to see her when we go back through London. What changed?”

  My whole life. “I’m curious. I think she is, too. And I think we’re both ready to treat each other as real people, not some personification of a role. We went back to Oslo when I was eleven, then back to London, then back to Oslo. That is, my mother and I went back. My father left and went to Chicago when I was thirteen. I went back and forth between England and Norway until I felt that both were my home, and neither. I hardly ever saw my mother. I finished school when I was seventeen. That summer my father wrote and asked me to visit him in Chicago. I didn’t want to spend summer in Chicago, but his invitation set me thinking. I was an American citizen who had never set foot in that country. And I thought: I could go to university there. So I applied to all kinds of schools, and I chose Georgia Tech.”

  “You’re smart and well connected. You could have gone anywhere: Yale, Harvard, Smith. Anywhere. So why Georgia?”

  “Because they said yes first. And because it’s warm. So I made a few phone calls, flew to London, told my mother where I was going, and caught the plane to Atlanta the next morning.”

  “The next morning, just like that?” Her hair shimmered as she shook her head, then cast again. Hiss, plop.

  “I flew economy on Delta, landed at five in the afternoon, local time, and got into a broken-down taxi whose driver had no idea where he was going.”

  “None of them ever do,” she said, one eye on her float. “Should have rented a car.”

  “I was used to English and Norwegian airport taxis.”

  “Rude surprise.”

  “Yes. Anyway, the only map I had was the one faxed to me in Norway by the manager of the apartment complex in Duluth where I had decided to rent—”

  “Duluth? That’s a forty-minute drive from Georgia Tech.”

  “I know that now. All I knew then was that…You’ve got a bite.”

  She began to reel in. “It’s a big one.”

  She landed a glistening perch, and while it flopped, cast again—and immediately got another bite. “Fish convention. Here we go. And another.”

  “I’ll smoke them over an alderwood fire,” I said, and my mouth flooded with saliva.

  “Do it now,” she said, and I rowed us back.

  We built the fire near the back door and sat on the stoop to eat them out of the pan, hot and oily. We wiped the oil up with bread. Julia stood, pan dangling from her hand. She smiled, and the line of her back, the crumb of bread at the corner of her mouth, struck deep. I caught her free hand and pulled her back down, kissed that slippery mouth, felt her breathing quicken under my hands. We were the only people for miles. I slid her shirt over her head and her pants down around her ankles, and when she came she tore out a handful of daisies with the grass and her cry was fierce as a hawk’s.

  She lay in my arms and smiled her slow, creamy smile. “More. But this time in bed.”

  This time it was slow, slow as the fall of night in northern latitudes, as the unfurling of a leaf in spring. My north, my springtime.

  We drowsed for a while, sun streaming through the southern windows onto the rugs below the sleeping gallery. I stroked her long, tanned fingers. She pulled the quilt up around her shoulders. “I can’t get used to the fact that seeing sunshine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hot. Does it ever get hot here?”

  “It gets warm in July and August, but not hot, and not humid.”

  “Not like Atlanta.” She settled more comfortably against my shoulder. “You were telling me how it was when you arrived in the U.S. Duluth.”

  I buried my face in her hair. Cloudberries and frying fish. “Well, for one thing, before I came to Atlanta, I didn’t know what humidity was. I’d read about it, and Christie Horley told me how awful it had been in New Orleans when she’d been there the year before, but verbal information isn’t the same as somatic. You have to feel it on your skin, touch it, smell it, run your fingers lightly through the sweat that never evaporates to understand.” I felt her nod against my shoulder. “So I got to Atlanta and took a cab for Duluth in August. The cab had no air-conditioning and the air was thick and sweet, like peach juice. I knew I wasn’t in Norway anymore. I was alone in an exotic foreign country at the start of a fine adventure. Anyway, the cab driver couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying half the time. Even though I’d told him I was Norwegian, he insisted that I was German—then wanted to know if I knew his son, Dan, who was in the army in Germany, in Mew-nick. I told him I was very sorry but that I didn’t know his son, and would he please head north on I-85 here, instead of south? His driving worried me.”

  Eighty miles an hour without seat belts, windows open to scoop up the viscous air, him steering with one finger and leaning back to talk to me about his son in Munich, careless of the fact that the other drivers hurtling along the interstate seemed as oblivious as he of the rules designed to keep people alive on the road.

  “The apartment complex was called Northwoods Lake Court. It was brand-new, frame units built around a lake. I don’t know how many buildings because they were all hidden by trees, but according to the manager there was only me, at the northeast end, and one family due to move in the next day at the extreme south end. The rest wouldn’t fill up for a month or so. The lake had fountains. The only luggage I had was two suitcases. I’d intended to take another cab into Duluth and buy necessities—bedding, kitchen things, lamps, because it was one of those apartments with no overheads—but the place was so beautiful I just wandered around until it was dark.”

  I couldn’t begin to describe to Julia the wonder of that place: swamp oak and bluebirds, swallows and bullfrogs, white oak and birch, my own private playground for a month.

  “My apartment was built on a slope so that although the front door was at ground level, the only possible access to any of the windows would be via ladder. And the apartment complex was empty. Besides, this wasn’t real life. This was the start of a grand adventure, like sleeping on the beach in Mauritius. All I had in my two suitcases were clothes, an old flashlight my father had had as a boy and had given me when I was seven, and a few books. That night I slept naked on the bedroom carpet, flashlight by my head and screened windows open to the sound of the fountains below and the chirring of tree frogs.” I had felt perfectly safe, cradled by air so soft it was tangible.

  “I fell asleep early; it must have been about ten o’clock but it seemed a lot later because of my six-hour jet lag. I don’t know what time it was when I woke but all of a sudden I was lying there, staring at this strange ceiling, lit by sodium light slatted by the window blinds, listening to the fountain. I was absolutely still, rigid, and I knew something was wrong. My heart ratcheted like an asymmetric crank. I listened hard, but all I could hear was the creaking chorus of tree frogs, the scratch of crickets across the velvet night, and the endless fountain. But I knew I had to keep still, there was this little voice in my primitive hindbrain whispering, Don’t move, don’t move, so I tried to look around the bedroom without turning my head but all I could see was shadow the colour of lead and those strips of yellow light. I was sweating, slick with it, and my heart felt like a vast, runaway engine, but I tried to think.”

  I could still remember the faintest metal touch of the flashlight against the middle finger of my right hand,
the sudden itching of the carpet as I sweated, the way a car changed gear in the distance, the voice in my crocodile brain saying, Don’t move, don’t move, and the restless red turbine in my chest beginning to whine and overheat.

  “And then a man’s voice said, ‘Don’t move, I have a gun.’”

  “Jesus!” She sat up.

  “It was an unremarkable sort of voice, very quiet and steady, but I couldn’t see him. The voice was so ordinary and the whole thing so surreal I thought that maybe he wasn’t there at all, that maybe it was a dream, but then there was a faint, oiled clicking from the shadow, and I knew it wasn’t a dream, my breath started to come in great gusts, and the muscles in my arms and legs coiled so tight and ready my bones hurt. Then he stepped forward, and suddenly in the slatted light there was a gun, ugly, clumsy looking. He kept coming forward and the light inched along a bare forearm, a white-shirted shoulder, up a lightly muscled neck to a reddish gold moustache.” I closed my eyes. “I can see it now, like a series of photographs. And that’s when it happened. It was as though this veneer fell away, as though I stepped aside from a mask, and it felt as though my heart slipped its bearings and hurtled loose. I came off the carpet without thinking, without even blinking, holding the flashlight—and it must have weighed three pounds—like a piece of kindling. It was so light in my hands. I surged off that carpet, muscles whipping like hawsers, swinging that flashlight up and out, and I was so sure. It was so easy. I swung up and out, unstoppable. He started to blink—that’s how fast everything was moving for me, I even noticed that the whites around his eyes looked bluish in the light—he started to blink but then three pounds of bright steel travelling at brutal speed caught him under the chin. His head snapped back and he fell. His body made a sort of lolloping thump on the carpet, like a big sack of potatoes.”

  I opened my eyes. It was odd to see the bedroom loft, the seter, the cool sunshine. I could remember the sweat on my skin, the blood roaring in my ears; humming with a sense of power; feeling huge and pure and fierce and filled with a wild, hot joy at being alive.