Encircling

by Carl Frode Tiller

  The time when we were entranced by a crane:

  My hair had dried after our swim, but the salt had left it stiff and bristling and when we hopped off our bikes and were wheeling them up the steep slope I suggested that we pop by Jon’s house to rinse ourselves off with the garden hose before setting out on our photo shoot. That was fine by Jon, but we would have to keep the noise down, he said, because his mother hadn’t slept a wink the night before, she’d been in so much pain, and now she was lying sleeping immediately above the tap for the hose. We looked at one another, you and I, and rolled our eyes slightly when he said this, I remember, because it was so typical of Jon to focus on and then blow out of all proportion the problems that might arise if one did this or that. The tap for the hose and Grete’s bedroom window were situated, if not on different sides of the house, then certainly far enough away from one another that we would have had to really shout and scream in order to wake her, and I was about to breathe a sulky “Yeah, yeah, Jon”, but it died on my lips because we were now so far up the slope that we could see across the flat stretch ahead of us and suddenly I caught sight of Arvid, watching a gang of construction workers tearing down an old house. So I drew your attention to him instead.

  “Imagine working in this heat,” was the first thing Arvid said to us when we reached him, and he pointed to the four workmen on the site in front of us, their coppery bodies glistening with sweat. Three of them were standing smoking and chatting while the fourth was sitting in the cab of a crane with a gigantic, rust-brown steel ball suspended from it by two steel chains – the sort of thing that I had only ever seen in my old Donald Duck comics. “Yeah,” we said and we said no more, so entranced were we by this comic-book machine. We simply stood and stared as the man in the cab began to pull the slender, black-knobbed levers, causing the steel ball to swing back and forth a few times, gradually rising higher and higher in the air and swinging faster and faster until eventually it smashed into the wall of the house, sending chunks of bricks and mortar flying like the bricks of a Lego house and come crashing down, sending up clouds of sand and greyish-white dust. I rested my elbow on my searing-hot bike seat and pointed to the twisted brown rods of reinforcing steel protruding from what was left of the wall: the shreds and fragments of mortar that clung to their tips made them look like bum hair with bits of shit stuck to it, otherwise known as dingleberries. You chuckled when I said this to you, but only minutes later this same comment was to prompt another display of ghastly sentimentality from Jon.

  It started with me remarking, after we’d been cycling for a while, that Arvid had been looking a bit glum. You said he was probably feeling a bit glum. He had spent most of his childhood living with the eldest of his aunts, who had given him enough in the way of food, drink and clothing, but far too little in terms of warmth, closeness and love, and with whom he had, therefore, a somewhat strained relationship. But from birth until the age of nine, when the dog tipped over a forgotten candle in their holiday cottage and started a fire in which his father and mother died, he had lived in the red-brick house we had just watched being demolished. “He doesn’t talk much about the time when he lived there with his parents, but he gets quite emotional whenever he leafs through the photo album from those years,” I remember you saying, and Jon got upset at this and shocked at me for comparing the remains of Arvid’s childhood home to pieces of shit, as he said.

  At first we thought he was joking, but once we realized that he actually wanted to be taken seriously and that this was merely another attempt to appear sensitive and caring we told him to cut out the bullshit, and shortly afterwards, after we had propped our bikes up against the garage wall at Jon’s place and gone to rinse off the salt, I made a point of screaming so loudly that I woke Grete. I laughed and blamed it on the ice-cold water, but it was clear from my grin that I was lying and that made Jon mad, and then of course he refused to come on the photo shoot after all, which would have been absolutely fine, not to say a pleasant relief if we hadn’t needed Jon to hold the light. He was well aware of this fact, of course, and milked it for all it was worth. He went all sad and dejected-looking, making it quite clear to us that it would be difficult to persuade him to come along, although not impossible of course, because in that case he knew we’d be on our bikes like a shot, leaving him behind, and this in turn would rob him of the pleasure of having us beg and plead and say that we really wanted him to come with us. I don’t know how long we sat in their garden coaxing and cajoling him, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour. We – or rather you, since I detested his play-acting and had to stand back a bit so as not to ruin everything by coming straight out and saying exactly what I thought – tried to soften him up by turning on the charm, being artificially bright and cheerful. It wasn’t until he started going on about how hard it was for his mother, though, and about how much pain she was in that you not only took the time to listen to him, but actually managed to look as if you were interested in what he was saying, and then he began to thaw. “Oh, all right, I’ll come,” he said at last (as if he were doing us a big favour), but by then he had, as so often before, succeeded in killing most of the enthusiasm and creative spark in both you and me, and no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t summon up the energy necessary to take a good picture. Jon, on the other hand, was suddenly in sparkling form and when we got to the point at Merraneset, where we meant to take interior shots of the old German bunkers, he was the real live wire of the group, burning with enthusiasm and bursting with ideas. He was like a parasite, he sucked the energy out of us. The more invigorated he became, the more we withered away and, although our thoughts on this may not have been entirely clear at the time, nonetheless we sensed how all of this hung together and it filled us with a rage that we found harder and harder to contain.

  The time when Mum received some good news:

  Mum was lying sleeping with her mouth open and you, I and some of her friends were sitting in a semicircle round the hospital bed, rather like teeth around a tongue. She must have eaten just before we arrived because the staff hadn’t taken away her plate and although the window was open the faint smell of boiled sausages still hung in the air. In my mind’s eye I suddenly saw link upon link of red frankfurters marching into her gaping mouth, like in a cartoon. And just as in cartoons such things tend to segue into something else, so the frankfurter links turned into a string of red railway carriages steaming into a dark tunnel, an image which prompted me, quite out of the blue, to utter loudly and clearly the words “sausage train”. In the split second before the others could respond to this I pictured a train whose passengers were all dead bulls, horses, cows and sheep, all crammed into dark, airless compartments, but then, when I became aware that the heads of everyone else in the room, including you, had swivelled (owl-like) towards me, and when the funny looks I was being given alerted me to what I had actually said, this image went straight out of my head (although I did use it later in an advert for vegetarian food) and I burst out laughing.

  If anyone else had been there with me they might well have thought that I wasn’t quite myself, what with the state Mum was in, and that was why I was behaving as I was, but none of those present was of a sentimental bent. They may have looked a little confused when I said it, but then, like a somewhat sluggish engine, the laughter sputtered into life and suddenly everyone around the sickbed was splitting their sides, and this, of course (and not surprisingly), woke Mum.

  As soon as she opened her eyes I could tell that she had good news for us. The person looking out through her eyes now was happy and much less frightened than she had been in the days before her admission to hospital, and after making a crack about what rotten friends we were, laughing and enjoying ourselves around her sickbed, she told us that the doctors had found nothing wrong with her and that in all likelihood a lack of sleep combined with overwork, too little food and far too much alcohol was to blame for the problems with her sight, the nausea and the incident when she had fainted and fallen off her ch
air.

  The worry she had felt until the doctors had given her the good news I would later come to picture as a kind of virus that passes from one host body to another, because it was probably hearing her talk about diseases that could lie dormant in the body for decades all undetected, only then to suddenly wake up and destroy a life in next to no time, that gave you the idea that your biological father might have suffered from just such a serious hereditary disease, and the next thing I knew it was you, and not Mum, who couldn’t stop worrying that you were sick.

  Such a disease would explain why your mother refused to tell you who your father was, I remember you saying. Because people who knew from an early age that they were suffering from a serious illness often succumbed to other ills. While some might be plagued by depression, anxiety or other forms of mental illness, others got it into their heads that they had to live life to the full while they could and ended up as alcoholics, drug addicts or decadent pleasure-seekers of one sort or another. And that being the case it was not surprising that your mother felt you were better off not knowing, or so you thought.

  “So now you’re looking for a soldier rapist with a tic who also happens to be suffering from a serious hereditary disease,” I said, and as before you laughed out loud when I joked about your fantasies concerning your father’s identity.

  The time when the Weed pointed at us and laughed:

  When Mum and my husband and I were in Namsos a few weeks ago we went for an evening stroll by the river. After several weeks of hot, dry weather the water level was much lower than normal and among all the other rubbish that had accumulated on the river bed over the years, I spotted a rusty old fold-up bike with red and yellow detonating cord wound round the spokes. A greyish-green blanket of sludge had draped itself over the seat and initially I thought that this was what gave the bike the look of a drowned horse, the steed of a medieval knight, lying there with its cape (or cover or whatever it’s called) rising and falling with the current. Only half a minute later, though, when we were halfway across the old wooden bridge and I turned and saw the bike and the rest of the scene from another angle, I realized that this notion stemmed from something else entirely, namely from an incident when this guy whom we used to call the Weed pointed at us and laughed.

  The Weed was only two or three years younger than us, but if not retarded, he was certainly a bit simple, and happiest therefore in the company of kids a few years younger than himself. One day when you and I were walking over the old bridge that Mum, my husband and I crossed a few weeks ago, we saw him and these younger chums of his in the little car park on the other side. They were playing at being knights at a tournament, riding around on their bikes, each with a stick for a lance, yelling and zooming round and round, knocking imaginary opponents off their mounts and hurling them to the ground, to the ecstatic cheers of the king they served, fair maidens in towers or whatever other witnesses to their deeds they saw and heard in their minds. But when the Weed spotted us he slammed on the brakes, slewing round and gouging a dark-brown streak in the gravel; and there he sat (wobbling on his seat for the first half-second), with his lance in the air, pointing at us and hooting with laughter, his mouth wide open. His eyes were round and avid, they flicked back and forth between us and his chums in a way that made him look like a stoat or a weasel or something of the sort. “Lovebirds, look at the lovebirds!” he yelled and I can still hear the wild, whinnying laugh he let out.

  But then something happened which we both found rather sad. Because even though the Weed’s chums were three or four years younger than him, they no longer saw anything particularly embarrassing about girls and dating and all that stuff and after a quick glance at us they eyed the Weed blankly, shrugged and said, “So what?” And then they all stood there, the Weed included, thinking the same thing (so it seemed): that yet another batch of kids was about to overtake the Weed in the maturity stakes.

  And this was exactly what we were talking about a little later when we walked into your kitchen and found Arvid sitting with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, his fingers sticking out of his unusually tousled hair like the antlers of a young reindeer. He didn’t say anything, but when he got up and came over to you, more gliding than walking with his face red and swollen from weeping and his arms stretched straight out in front of him like a sleepwalker in a cartoon or a zombie in a B-movie, we knew right away that something terrible had happened to your mother; that Berit was dead. Unlike me you didn’t start to cry, your face was tight and expressionless and for a little while you appeared to be more concerned with how to avoid putting your arms round Arvid, but that you couldn’t do, because he flung his arms around you, buried his face in the hollow of your shoulder, hugged you tight and rocked you from side to side, as if you were two exhausted wrestlers in the ring. Not until you asked what had happened did he release you. You gave a little wriggle, shaking off the hand that still rested on your shoulder. It dropped limply to his side and a disappointed, almost hurt look came over his face as he told you that she had collapsed and died in Ole Bruun Olsen’s shoe shop and that it had probably been a heart attack.

  I didn’t realize it then, but now I see that it was Berit’s death and the freedom from obligations and expectations that the death of a father or mother always entails that lay behind the change that took place in you over the weeks that followed, or rather – perhaps it’s wrong to say that you changed, perhaps it would be truer to say that you were now able to make choices that you had long wanted to make, but which, out of regard for what Berit might think or believe or feel, you could not bring yourself to make – like moving in with me, for example.

  We didn’t live together in the attic at our house for that many weeks before you left for Trondheim and I went to Bergen, but I remember how grown-up I felt when we brushed our teeth and went to bed together without shagging, or when we sat, bored out of our skulls, at either end of Mum’s russet Chesterfield sofa (a foretaste of settled coupledom), the very sofa that I’m sitting on now, as it happens, with my laptop on my knees and one of Mum’s rosé wines on the table next to me – which, by the way, leads me to think that the death of a father or a mother does not make us as free as I just suggested, after all. At any rate, being here in the flat Mum lived in till she died, and being in much the same situation as she was in when she was not much older than I am now, I can’t help feeling that I’m taking over her life. I’ve always described the phase I’m going through at the moment as time to think, a breathing space, but – and without dwelling too much on this when it holds so little relevance for you anyway – I would go so far as to say that I feel as though I’m being sucked into the way of life she began to adopt after Dad died, the life that from the age of ten or eleven I was used to seeing her lead. So maybe Jon was right, after all. Maybe it is harder to break free than I always thought (oh, God).

  Trondheim, July 5th 2006. A showdown

  I’m lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling, and I hear Egil arriving home, so now I’ll have to get up, now I’ll have to make it look as though I’ve been doing something and when he asks why I haven’t been at work I’ll have to say that I had a headache or something. I get up off the sofa, walk across the living room and into the kitchen. I go over to the fridge, open the fridge, crouch down and take a look inside. There are leftovers from yesterday, maybe we should just heat up the leftovers for dinner.

  “Hi,” I hear Egil say. “Hi,” I say and I hear my own voice, and my voice sounds tired. “Where are you?” I hear Egil ask and I peep over the fridge door and there he is, looking down at me. “Ah, there you are,” he says, and he smiles. “Yes,” I say. “I thought I’d start making dinner,” I say. “But …” Egil says, and he looks at me in astonishment and raises his eyebrows slightly as he puts down his briefcase. His shoulders are covered in stray blond hairs. “But weren’t we going out to eat?” he says, and I remember that we were supposed to be going out to eat, and I look at him and smile. “Oh yes, that’s right,
so we were,” is all I say and I stand up, give the fridge door a little nudge and it closes with a soft thud, then I stand there looking at Egil and Egil stands there looking at me, then he gives a little shake of his head.

  “You’ve been saying for ages that you’d like to go out and eat,” Egil says. “Yes, I know,” I say. “Christ,” he says, and he looks at me and raises his eyebrows, and a moment passes and I look at him and sigh. “There’s no need to make a big deal of it?” I say. “I’m not making a big deal of it,” he says. “I just wonder what’s got into you lately,” he says, and he looks at me and raises both eyebrows again and gives his head a little shake. “You’re not yourself,” he says. “Is it because of your mother?” he asks. “If there’s anything the matter with me it’s certainly not because of her,” I say. “Well, if it’s got anything to do with us having to cancel the trip to Brazil, you don’t have to worry,” he says. “I can take the last week in September off instead,” he says and he looks at me and I look at him, and a moment passes and then something seems to break loose inside me, something heavy, and it feels like a landslide sweeping through me.

  “Well,” I cry, “you’ve got a bloody nerve!” I say and I can hear the fury in my voice and I’ve no idea where it comes from, this furious voice, and I jerk my head at him and he draws his head back slightly and gazes at me in astonishment. “Huh?” he says. “You’re so unbelievably condescending to me,” I say and I hear what I’m saying and I don’t know where it comes from, what I’m saying, it’s as if someone else is talking through me, and the person who’s talking through me is absolutely furious and I realize that I’m becoming absolutely furious as well, and Egil stands there looking baffled. “What on earth do you mean by that?” he says.