But on the evening of the second day we got caught. We were sitting drinking in the light of a low red sun that hung glowing behind the pines, and we were so busy trying to come up with the right tune for some lyrics that Silje had written for us that we forgot where we were and fell back into the Namsos dialect in between all our humming. I don’t know how long we’d been out of character, but suddenly the owner of the campsite was standing right in front of us. He was a tall, skinny, stooped man with a comb-over and dark sweat stains under the arms of his shirt and he glared at us for some time with beady, hostile eyes before spitting out a question as to what we had to hide if we found it necessary to go around pretending to be somebody we weren’t. You immediately switched to an Oslo drawl and tried to explain it away by saying that we had just been fooling about and trying to imitate the accent, but he said we could stick our imitations up our arses, because he knew who we were and what we were up to.
I automatically assumed that he really did know who we were and what we were up to and – slightly drunk as I was, and angry and half in panic at being found out – I surprised you and myself by jumping up from my camping chair and snapping at him that it was none of his fucking business what we did in bed. The minute I said it I was filled with a mixture of delight, relief and pride, but then I saw the baffled look on his face and realized that he hadn’t the faintest idea of what we got up to in bed. I stood there gaping, humming and hawing and trying to come up with some sort of excuse. I couldn’t, but it didn’t matter, because he appeared to be every bit as flustered as I was. He asked no more questions, just slunk quietly away.
We reassured ourselves by saying that he probably thought we’d given false names because we were crooks or were planning to leave without paying, and after a while, once we were sure that he wasn’t coming back to ask for our real names, we grew positively elated, our spirits higher than ever. Again and again we told each other how we had really put him in his place. We laughed and described the look on his face and the way he had plodded off, feeling more and more like the two liberated, proud, invulnerable young men we so very much wanted to be. In our own eyes we had shown ourselves to be every bit as brave as Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac and it was not the disconcerted and somewhat bemused owner of Namsos Campsite we had defied, but the average Namsos man as we liked to think of him: a bigoted, intolerant, narrow-minded provincial who was out to stop us from living the way we wanted to. I can still remember the deep sense of togetherness I felt as we sat there, going over the whole experience again and again. No, it was more than that – I’d go so far as to say that what I felt was love, and for the rest of that evening and night I remember longing for and dreaming of a chance to show that love.
Mind you, that was something I often dreamed of. Banal though it was, I used to imagine you falling ill or getting hurt or being in some sort of danger and I would be the one who came to your aid when everyone else had failed you and, again banally, I always imagined that this would lead you to declare your great and unconditional love for me, something which was hard to envisage ever happening in real life, actually, because even though I knew you enjoyed being with me, that you relaxed, opened up, and that you were less concerned then with maintaining your cool, tough image than when you were with other people, it bothered you if I behaved towards you the way a lover would normally do. When we had sex you weren’t the slightest bit shy, but afterwards, if I snuggled up to you, wanting to lie in the crook of your arm, or if I put my arms round your waist when I was on the back of your moped, or if we were standing next to one another and I brushed you gently with my hand you became edgy, embarrassed, and you would immediately try to find some tactful excuse to pull away. “Shh,” you might say, putting your finger to your lips. “I thought I heard someone.” And then you would wrench yourself free and go over to the window, as if to check whether there was anyone out there. I knew you didn’t want to hurt me, and I didn’t want to put you in a situation where you felt pressured into doing so, and this – as well, of course, as the fear of being hurt and rejected – led me to act as if I’d been taken in. “There it was again,” I would say, and then I’d prick up my ears and be on my guard as well.
I knew why you shied away from me, or at least I thought I did. Exchanging such physical gestures of affection would make it more difficult to carry on acting as though sleeping with a person of the same sex was no more than an innocent exploration of our bodies and our sexuality. It would take our relationship to a new and more serious level, and you weren’t quite ready for that yet. There was so much at stake, you needed time, so I decided to stop coming on to you like that for a while.
But then it happened, what had been bound to happen: our secret got out, the rumour that we were gay began to spread and we were forced into making the decision that we had put off making for so long.
Mum never got what you’d call drunk, certainly not when I was around, but one evening, when she had braved the pain of the fibrositis and the attendant dread of social gatherings and gone to one of those hen parties that she had been to so often in the past, she came home in a taxi at half-past eight, obviously plastered and with a bitter, tortured look on her face. “If only it had been you and not your brother whose balls had been ruined. You don’t need yours, anyway,” she said as I crouched down to help her off with her shoes, and after a brief fit of hysterical laughter she put her hands to her face and burst into tears. Later, I discovered that the owner of the campsite had got hold of your name by checking the registration number of the moped and that this was where the rumour about us being gay had started. But just at that moment I couldn’t figure out where Mum’s friends could have heard what they’d heard, and so I sat there listening numbly to an incoherent, tearful account of how the party’s hostess, seemingly in all innocence but secretly desperate to humiliate her, had asked Mum ever so sweetly if it was true that I was gay, and that I was going out with the vicar’s stepson. According to Mum, the other women at the party had spent the whole evening talking at great length and in glowing terms about their own husbands, children and grandchildren, and in the endless competition to see who was the happiest and most successful, Mum had milked me and my excellent school grades for all I and they were worth, “just to have this thrown in my face”, as she put it.
The next day she tried to make out that she’d forgotten the whole thing, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. She stayed out of my way as much as she could and if we did find ourselves in the same room she avoided my eye and made a show of being busy with things that weren’t important or that certainly didn’t need to be done right then. Not only that but she kept saying that she hadn’t blacked out like that since her teens. “I don’t remember a thing, I really don’t. When did I actually get home? In a taxi? Was I very drunk? Oh, I’m so embarrassed! Just as well the neighbours didn’t see me!” and so on, and I put on a smile of sorts and tried to look unconcerned.
I remember we were roaming around the east side of the town when I told you all this. You were white with rage. Why the hell did I let myself be treated like that, you asked, and even though I made excuses for Mum by saying that she’d been drunk, and even though I tried to explain how much she had sacrificed for me and what a good, caring mother she could be, it touched me to see you like that. Whether it was because I couldn’t bring myself to be angry with her myself and needed you to be angry for me, or whether it was simply good to see and to know that you cared about me and that it upset you to see someone hurt me, I don’t know, but I remember telling you that I loved you. I had never said it before and I still remember how it felt, standing there just after the words had left my mouth. I’ve never had children, and I doubt I ever will, but if I were trying to be poetic, I would say that uttering those particular words was much like a mother letting her child go out into the world and hoping that people will receive him or her well and be good to them.
As you did. “I love you too,” you said, and since you didn’t like extravagant word
s and shows of emotion and because I was so happy and felt so moved at that moment that I was afraid to spoil it all by saying something you would consider pompous or pathetic, I said nothing else for some time. We strolled side by side past the wire fence around Van Severen’s sawmill and I remember the spray from one of the hoses that kept the timber damp falling right over onto the pavement, leaving a dark, narrow band on the sun-baked tarmac. I don’t know whether it’s nostalgia for my childhood in the sawmill town of Namsos or an echo of the happiness I felt at that moment that runs through me today when I catch the whiff of wet timber and sawdust, but I am filled, at any rate, with a strange little surge of happiness, a sense of belonging maybe.
Alongside the happiness I felt right then and in the days that followed there was, of course, uncertainty and fear. We were at an age when you tend to be self-centred and quick to make a big drama and a big deal out of the smallest things, but this really was a big deal. It’s true that we thought people were more interested in whether we were gay or not than they probably were, nonetheless we were right in thinking that the way in which we chose to deal with our relationship and the rumours of our homosexuality would have major and definitive consequences for our own futures. I’m as convinced of this now as I was back then. In a way it was kind of exhilarating, this feeling that everything really was at stake, and there were times over the next few days when I was pompous enough to tell myself that at least I was leading a more intense and more fascinating life than most people. There were other times, though, when I was seized by a paralysing sense of dread: I could be sitting practising or maybe watching TV and all at once and for no reason that I could see the nausea would rise up in my throat, a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck and my brow turn cold and clammy. At times like that I had a desperate urge to resolve all of the questions that were churning around in my head, and even though I felt sick at the thought of broaching the subject with you, I probably would have done if it hadn’t been for Berit’s sudden death, after which, for a while, none of this mattered.
I’m not exactly sure what the post-mortem revealed, but I seem to remember that it had to do with some sort of heart defect. In any case, she simply keeled over in a shoe shop, without any warning, and she was dead before the ambulance arrived. I’d never known anyone who had lost someone close to them, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when Silje and I were standing on the front step of your and Arvid’s house, waiting for you to open the door. I had the idea that the grief you bore would be so great that it would show itself in ways I would never forget, and I remember being surprised at how relaxed you seemed. It knocked me off-balance when, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, you started talking about some lyrics that Silje had just written or a film you were looking forward to seeing, and I didn’t quite know how to react when you told a funny story you had heard and then roared with laughter. To begin with I thought this was some sort of defence mechanism, that your apparent air of calm was a sign that your mother’s death hadn’t sunk in yet, but that couldn’t be it because you spoke about Berit and her death as well. Even then, though, it was no heartbroken, devastated young man who spoke, as I had imagined and as I had hoped, since that would have given me the chance to comfort and support you, thereby proving the love that I so longed to show. The only time I saw you betray any kind of pain or sorrow was when you and Silje and I were walking along Havnegata and we passed the artist whose work Berit had liked so much, but whom you had once called a local nutter who thought that all it took to be an artist was to slap a beret on his head. You didn’t say anything right away, but you went very quiet and a little later when we were sitting in Silje’s living room, listening to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, you gave vent to a brief but moving emotional outburst in which, in a voice that shook slightly, you admitted to feeling guilty for the way you had treated Berit. You blamed yourself for having been cold and hard and you couldn’t forgive yourself for having made fun of her when she told you about a book she had read or showed you a picture she had bought. You also believed that her sudden interest in the arts had actually been an attempt of sorts to get closer to you, which just made the whole thing worse. The novels, the volumes of poetry, the art gallery, the National Theatre productions; the way you saw it, it wasn’t because she had woken up one morning feeling like a new woman that she had decided to explore all of this. No, she had simply been trying to get through to you by showing an interest in, and learning more about, things that she knew meant a lot to you. “And even though I knew this right from the start, I pushed her away,” you said.
Namsos, July 5th 2006. At Wenche’s
It’s okay now, everything’s cool, just forget what happened back there, don’t think about it. It’ll be a long, fucking time before I talk to Mum again, though, not to mention Eskil and Hilde, can’t think when I’ll ever want to see them again. I walk up the steps to the front door. Ring the bell. Hook my thumbs into the loops on my belt and stand there trying to look laid-back. I glance down at the steps and up again. Then I see my name underneath the bell button. If she still hasn’t taken my name down, she must still have some faint hope. I could be doing the wrong thing showing up here like this if she’s hoping I’ll come back, I don’t want to give her false hope, either. Maybe I should have gone to the cottage after all, bought food and wine and taken the bus over there, spent some time on my own, read books, gone fishing, taken it easy, but it’s too late now. I hear the sound of the hall door opening, I’ll have to ask if I can stay here till things sort themselves out. They always do, eventually. I take a step back, lean one elbow on the iron banister behind me, try to look relaxed, laid-back, look as if I just popped by to say hello, just happened to be in the neighbourhood. And then the front door opens, slowly, and there’s Wenche. She looks at me, I try to smile, but she doesn’t smile back, her face is still, expressionless almost, and she doesn’t say anything, just stares at me.
“Hi, Wenche,” I say.
“Hi.”
Two beats.
“Well, you look thrilled to see me,” I say, attempting a little laugh. But she doesn’t laugh, she shuts her eyes and breathes a big sigh, opens her eyes again and stands there looking at me. She has these kind of affectedly weary eyes.
“What do you want, Jon?” she asks.
“What do I want?”
“Yes.”
I nod at the label under the doorbell.
“Well, it looks like I live here,” I say with another attempt at a laugh, but she doesn’t laugh back, just blinks her eyes languidly and curls one corner of her mouth.
“Oh, please!” she says.
I look at her, realize this is a bit awkward, embarrassing, and I stop laughing.
“Sorry,” I say.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
I look into her green eyes, eyes like gooseberries.
“Because I’ve nowhere else to go, simple as that,” I say, just telling her the plain truth.
She rolls her eyes.
“Oh, thanks a lot,” she says. “You really know how to flatter a girl.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say with a short laugh.
She looks me straight in the eye, holds my gaze for a second, then a small smile spreads across her face, she thaws slightly, shakes her head and steps aside, motions me into the flat.
“Oh, come on in,” she says. “You can sleep on the couch.”
“Thanks!” I say, smiling, feeling relieved, didn’t even have to ask if I could stay the night, it sorted itself out. I kick off my shoes, dump them on the shoe rack, hang my jacket on the slightly lopsided wooden coat stand. The same shoe rack, the same coat stand as when I lived here, it’s weird, it feels as though I’ve hardly been gone at all, and yet everything’s totally different. It’s like coming home and being a visitor at the same time.
“But where are your things – didn’t you bring them?” she asks.
“Nope,” I say, being totally straight w
ith her. I know she likes that side of me, my impulsive, spontaneous streak. She used to say that it drove her crazy, but I knew she liked it, liked being the one who straightened things out and looked after me, the one who was in control.
“No bass, no clothes, no toiletries even?” she asks.
“Nope, I just upped and left,” I say.
She shuts her eyes and shakes her head despairingly, looks at me and smiles. Just as I thought, she likes it, I can tell.
“I see,” she says, putting her hands on her hips, smiling at me. “So what is it this time?”
I shrug, smile back.
“Oh, I had a bit of a set-to with Mum and Eskil,” I say.
“With Grete and Eskil? I thought you were on tour.”
“No, no! I left the band,” I say, come right out with it, I might as well, she’ll find out anyway when she talks to Lars and Anders.
“What?” she says, sticking her head an inch or so further forward, staring at me round-eyed. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You know what, you never change. You left – just like that? One minute it’s the best thing that ever happened to you, and the next … why on earth did you leave the band?”
I look at her and smile rather ruefully, indicating to her that I don’t feel like talking about it right now. But she’s not about to quit. She’s still the same, still as persistent.
“Well?” she says.
“Please, Wenche,” I say. “Let’s talk about this later.”
“Why?”
“Hey. Don’t start interrogating me straight away,” I say a little wearily, but still smiling. “I’m just in the door,” I say.
“Interrogating you? I only asked.”
I look at her, give a faint sigh.
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