Encircling

by Carl Frode Tiller

  “Congratulations,” I say, trying to smile and look unfazed, but she sees right through me, knows how I feel, I can see it on her.

  “Thanks,” she says, in a rather sad voice designed somehow to show that in the midst of all this she feels sorry for me.

  At last Mum lets go of Hilde.

  “Oh my God, I don’t know what to say!” she cries, pauses for a moment and just stands there smiling, mouth open, then she claps her hands together. “Well, come on then,” she says eagerly, “Let’s hear all about it,” she says, sitting down. “Where’s he from? What country? Have you decided on a name? I want to know everything, everything!” she cries, her voice almost a little too bright, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her quite like this before. Hilde looks at her, she smiles, but doesn’t seem to want to get too carried away, shoots a glance at me as she slips her hand into her bag, it’s like she’s considering my feelings, like she’s toning down her own happiness for my sake.

  “Ah, here it is,” she says, producing some papers, yellow and pink papers stapled together in one corner. “There,” she says, detaching a photo held in place by a paper clip.

  “Oh, you’ve got a photo?” Mum exclaims eagerly. She shunts forward in her seat and puts out her hand. “Let me see, let me see,” she says, takes the picture and stares at it, wide-eyed, doesn’t say a word, just sits there staring. Then all of a sudden she starts crying again. Tears well up in the corners of her eyes. “Oh my God, he’s beautiful,” she says, then swallows. “Where’s he from?”

  “Colombia,” Eskil says.

  “Where’s that?”

  “South America,” Eskil says.

  “Oh, my, look at those beautiful eyes,” Mum says and then she turns to me, hands me the photo. “Look, Jon!” she says. “Isn’t he beautiful?!”

  I take the photograph from her with a rather limp, indifferent hand, hating myself even as I do so, I don’t want to be like this, but I am, I want to show an interest, but I can’t find it in me, I look at the photo, see a small, dark-skinned child with black curly hair, take a quick, perfunctory glance at him and hand the picture back.

  “Hmm,” is all I say. My stomach wrenches as I say it, I don’t want to be like this, but there’s nothing to do about it. And the other three look right through me. And I burn with shame, I bleed inside, but I keep smiling, try to act nonchalant, but don’t quite manage it, and Mum glares at me, furious, she doesn’t say anything, but there’s contempt in her eyes, just for a second, and then she looks down at the photo and smiles again, smiles and gives a slight shake of her head, looks up at Eskil and Hilde again. Then come the questions: how old is the child, do they know anything about the parents, what sort of background does he come from, have they decided on a name? She asks eagerly and Eskil replies enthusiastically.

  “Oh my God, I can’t wait,” Mum says. She picks up the coffee jug, fills the cups on the table, all smiles.

  “Did you forget to take your pills?” I blurt.

  She turns to me and I can almost see the happiness fade from her face, see that sour look return.

  “What?” she asks, she has no idea what I’m talking about, she’s probably forgotten all about what she told me earlier today: those new pills made her hands shake so badly that she couldn’t even pour coffee, she said.

  “I mean, your hands are so steady! Did you forget to take your pills?” I say again. Don’t want to say it, but I say it anyway, the words spat out as if they were just aching to be said. I try to smile and act as if I’m only joking, but it’s no use, all I can muster is a spiteful grin. A moment, then Mum simply turns away, can’t even be bothered saying anything, she looks upset now. She glances down at the picture of the little boy again and suddenly she’s all smiles once more, seems to melt as soon as her eyes fall on that child. There’s silence. Eskil picks up his pack of cigarettes, flips up the lid, raises the pack to his mouth and pulls out a cigarette with his lips.

  “Oh my God, he’s so beautiful,” Mum says again, her eyes fixed on the picture, and I look at her and grin: this woman who has always referred to dark-skinned people as darkies and wogs, she and Eskil both, ultra-right-wingers the pair of them, petty racists, but here they are, gazing adoringly at a dark-skinned toddler, it’s so fucking phony it’s just not true.

  “Even though he’s a darkie?” I say. It just comes out, spat from my lips. I try to make it sound funny, but it doesn’t sound funny, just nasty, mean. And Eskil turns to me, and Mum and Hilde turn to me. There’s total silence and I feel the heat rising, I’m bleeding inside.

  “What the hell are you’re saying?” Mum snaps, looking at me.

  “You and Eskil, anybody dark-skinned has always been a darkie to you two,” I say, trying to sound artless, still grinning. They stare at me, there’s total silence, and I’m bleeding harder and harder, but I keep the grin in place.

  “You know what, Jon,” Eskil growls, then he takes the cigarette from his lips unlit, pauses. “You know what … just fucking stop it.”

  I don’t say anything, just sit there trying to keep that grin on my face, look at Eskil, try to hold his eye, but I can’t, I look down at my lap.

  “You always have to go too far, don’t you?” he says. “Anyone would think you wanted to turn people against you. I don’t know why you do it, why you always have to show yourself up. It’s as if … when you sense that something you’ve said or done has upset people, you never try to make it right, the way other people would, instead you do your level best to make things worse. You’re so destructive it’s not fucking true,” he says.

  I glance up at him, try to look as if I don’t care, try to grin, but can’t quite manage it, it comes out as a pained, uneasy smirk.

  “It’s society’s fault that I’m the way I am, Eskil,” I say, trying to sound ironic.

  “Please, Jon,” he says earnestly. “I mean it.”

  “We’re living in the free-market society that you and your party are so much in favour of,” I go on, refusing to back down, trying to take refuge in irony. “The ideals of solidarity and fellowship are dead. These days we’re all supposed to be masters of our own fortunes, which in practice means that we all believe we’re totally responsible for the lives we have.”

  I hear Mum sigh.

  “Jon!”

  “The winners think they can take all the credit for their success, and the losers think it’s their own fault that they’ve failed,” I say, simply cutting him off, I won’t back down, know that I’m making an even bigger fool of myself, but I go ahead anyway, can’t help myself. “And since I’m a loser, I feel I have to be punished,” I go on, can’t stop, have to somehow see it through.

  “Jon,” Eskil cries. “I mean it! This is not funny!”

  But I won’t back down, I whip myself on.

  “I want to be humiliated and ridiculed, because society has taught me that as a loser I don’t deserve any better,” I say. “That’s why I am the way I am. While you, as a winner, believe you ought to be celebrated and saluted.”

  “Stop being so fucking flippant, dammit!” Eskil suddenly shouts, roars at me, and I flinch, stare at him with fear in my eyes, only for a second, then I twist my face back into a grin, look at the floor and try to laugh the whole thing off, give a little chuckle, but I look unsure, I know I do, look uneasy.

  Two seconds.

  “You don’t have to take it out on us, just because you’re a poof,” Eskil cries.

  Silence.

  What the hell did he just say? Where the hell did that come from? I look up at him, stare at him and feel the grin fade, the grin seems to slide off my face, and his words seem to lodge inside me and swell, lodge and resound inside me.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t remember, Jon,” Eskil says, frowning and curling his upper lip, baring his front teeth. He eyes me, gives a little shake of his head.

  “Remember what?” I say, look at him, don’t know what he’s talking about.

  “What you said to Hilde at Mum’s
sixtieth birthday party.”

  I turn to Hilde, she’s sitting there looking straight at me, grave-faced, and I must have said something to her, I can tell.

  “How you thought there were so many attractive men there,” Eskil says.

  My stomach lurches at his words, I can’t remember saying that, but I realize I must have done, I can tell from Hilde’s face that I must have done. There’s total silence, Mum is confused, her eyes flick back and forth, she looks quite distraught. She picks up the picture of the little boy again, looks at it and puts on a smile, tries to block out what’s being said, pretending not to hear what she’s hearing, and Hilde regards me with eyes full of pity, a look designed to tell me that she knows how I feel. Both she and Eskil imagine that they know how I think and feel, they think they’ve found me out. Hilde has heard me pass some remark when I was drunk, they’ve discussed it at home and come to the conclusion that I’m gay, and now they have the idea that this is what lies behind everything I say or do. They’re so fucking naive it’s just not true, they’ve given Mum a grandchild and they think I’m hurt because I’m gay and can’t give her the same, that must be why Hilde has been feeling so bloody sorry for me all this time, that must be why she didn’t want to say anything about the adoption. Now I get it. Mum told them I was here when they called from the car and Hilde didn’t want to say anything about the adoption after all. That’s probably why she and Eskil were arguing when they got here, too. I look at them, one beat, I look at them and twist my face into a wrathful grin, make a desperate attempt to show them how ridiculous they are, and then I get up and go, don’t know where I’m going, just go.

  Vemundvik, July 14th–16th 2006

  Once they reach their mid-forties, once their kids are old enough to fend for themselves, it’s a well-known fact that many women take advantage of their new-found time and freedom to “go all arty-farty” as Mum so scornfully used to put it. With laughter in your voice and a faintly despairing note that became only moments later as scathing and scornful as Mum’s, you told me how Berit had suddenly started taking an interest in art and culture. Out of nowhere this woman who had scarcely ever opened a book before had taken to buying and borrowing books: either what you so contemptuously described as novels about long-suffering, hard-pressed, but strong women in the Norwegian provinces, or volumes of poetry – which is to say, rhyming verse, always with a simple, straightforward message that almost invariably boiled down to the importance of seizing the day. You also told me that she’d started popping into the Arts Centre gallery after doing the shopping on Saturday mornings, and that unfortunately she didn’t always confine herself to simply looking. On one occasion she had come home lugging an enormous figurative daub by – to quote you – some local nutter who thought all it took to be an artist was to slap a beret on your head. On another occasion she bought an abstract painting to which the so-called artist had glued a feather and some pencil shavings: a touch which, according to you, fooled Berit into thinking that this monstrosity of a picture was a fine example of cutting-edge modern art. Inspired by a woman friend who, according to you, kept anxiety and depression at bay by redecorating her whole home once a year, she also started subscribing to an interior design magazine, to give her ideas on how to do up the house. You said it was bad enough that she couldn’t get her tongue round the foreign words and said “coroco”, instead of “rococo” when you had guests – not just once, but again and again, until you had to leave the room, red with embarrassment – even worse was the fact that her dream home appeared to be some sort of layer-cake palace, all pillars and spires, carvings, balconies and glazed roof tiles glittering in the sunlight – a style which she would probably manage to trick Arvid into imitating when they eventually got round to doing up the outside of the house.

  I remember being surprised by the aggressive, not to say hateful tone in which you related much of this, and more than once I had to calm you down and remind you that, still, it was good that Berit was trying to broaden her horizons. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined my own mum doing anything like that, so intent was she on fleeing from everything that wasn’t directly entertaining. She moaned and sighed her way through the news every time she watched it, because it was so boring, and before they were halfway through a television debate she would be wagging her head and saying “blah, blah, blah”, or breaking into her eternal “why can’t they talk so ordinary folk can understand them!” rant. While Berit had actually started visiting galleries, and while she had attended at least one play staged at the Arts Centre by the National Theatre, my mum spent every single evening glued to Falcon Crest and Wheel of Fortune and the like, and while Berit actually went to the library and borrowed books, Mum went to the newsagents to buy the women’s mags and scandal sheets which were the only things she read, apart from the Namdal Workers’ Weekly. Although it’s true she was always saying, “I don’t know why I bother buying these rags, they print nothing but smut,” as if to show that she wasn’t a complete idiot, but a week later, when I reminded her of what she had said, her eyes would narrow and a sly look would come over her face, a look that seemed to say she knew she was doing something illegal, but she didn’t give a shit. “I still have to have them, though, you know,” she would say in a quick whisper and then she would laugh that husky smoker’s laugh of hers.

  All of this I told you, not just once, but lots of times, and because it made you feel that Berit wasn’t so bad after all, you were always glad to hear it.

  But when your mother started wearing a hat, it didn’t matter what I said. A hat was a powerful and highly visible symbol in a small town such as Namsos. Berit might just as well have worn a sign round her neck saying, “I’m better than you lot”. You hated that hat. It was round and red with a broad, flat brim that made it look like half of Saturn with one of its rings. You never said a word about it, but if we were having coffee in Hamstad’s café on a Saturday morning and she came in wearing that hat you turned scarlet with embarrassment, and if she spotted us and came over to talk to us you were so surly and brusque and offhand with her that it was almost farcical, and then Silje and I would feel sorry for her and try to smooth things over as best we could.

  Because, no matter how hard we strove to kid ourselves and everyone else that we didn’t care what our mothers said or did, it made no difference. We told ourselves that we had our life and they had theirs, but no one could make us more embarrassed, annoyed, angry or worried on their behalf than our mothers, and there was no one we could less stand to see being slurred or slighted, unless we were the ones doing the slurring and slighting. Before Mum was diagnosed as having fibrositis, for instance, no one took her seriously when she complained that her back hurt and she couldn’t work, and I remember the anger, bordering on hate, that I felt towards friends and neighbours who said, “Oh, but you look so well,” thereby implying that she was only whingeing and whining.

  Our mothers were also there in just about everything we said, thought and did. We didn’t always do what they wanted, obviously, but what they wanted was never irrelevant to us, and we craved their praise as much as we dreaded their rejection. We might be embarrassed by how shamelessly eager they were to tell other people how well we were doing at school, and how far we would go in life, but we did nothing to stop them, apart from rolling our eyes while they stood there boasting about us. “Well, it’s not that he isn’t bright, that’s for sure,” Berit was always saying about you, before adding: “Although he’s not very practical, it has to be said.” As if she thought such a slight jocular modification would lend more credibility to her words and make the listener forget that this was a mother talking about her son.

  The constant fear of them finding out that we were more than just friends was another instance of the way in which they were always with us. Mum settled down a bit after I told her straight out that we weren’t gay, but she was still wary and we became even more careful than we had been before. No more locking my bedroom door, turning up
the music and trusting that she wouldn’t know what was going on. No more of you sleeping over because it was late and you “couldn’t be bothered” going home, this being our usual excuse. If we went away together for a few days, renting a cottage somewhere, we also started booking it under false names, so no one would know who we really were if they found out what we were up to. At night we usually shared a sleeping bag, but we always made a point of unrolling the spare one, laying it on the other bed and rumpling it up a bit to make it look as if we were each sleeping in our own bed, just in case somebody happened to look in. And on the rare occasion when we used a condom we were very careful not to just chuck it in the bin afterwards. We always took out whatever was on the very top, dropped in the condom and made sure it was well covered by other rubbish.

  Still, though, so we did get caught once. We had rented a cottage at Namsos Campsite under fake names and spent a great first couple of days drinking white wine, writing songs and having a lot of fun making everyone around us think that we were rich men’s sons from the west side of Oslo. We sauntered about with our sweaters tied around our shoulders and our hands in our pockets, calling each other Rikard and Wilhelm Jr. I never really got into the part, though. Either I didn’t dare to let myself go completely or I was so determined to let myself go that I wound up overdoing it and sounding and acting like a bad caricature of a drawling upper-class twit. You, on the other hand, simply became Wilhelm Jr. You pretended to have difficulty understanding the Trøndelag dialect of the woman in the campsite kiosk and whenever we passed other campers you would be sure to say things like, “in my father’s circles”, but you never took the snooty, west-side manner any further than that. You were also affable, gallant and extremely polite. You held the door open for ladies going into the kiosk, you smiled and nodded to the other campers and when we were queuing for the sinks in the campsite shower block you would happily give up your place to someone older or someone with children.