‘That’s the end of my list,’ says Ulli. ‘And now we have to discuss everybody’s ideas.’
‘Is this going to go on all night?’ asks Silja. ‘I only want to know.’
‘I consider all these excellent points!’ says Pappy heartily. ‘Especially yours, Ulli. We should have respect for one another. We should not have bad temper. We should not have – what was it? Argues? We should all get up at dawn to make each other cups of tea. There might be rather a crowd in the kitchen, but that’s by the way. Another drink, Silja?’
‘Yes please – well now, Ulli, are you satisfied? Have we done whatever it was that you wanted?’
‘It must be about time to ring the bell?’ suggests Pappy.
‘But we haven’t talked about any of it,’ begins Ulli. A glance from her mother stops her. ‘I’ll collect up the papers now,’ she says. ‘We have to keep them in here.’
Silja and Pappy watch as Ulli clips the sheets together and inserts them in a file on which she has written FAMILY MEETINGS.
‘Next time, we’ll have the boys, too,’ she says. ‘They can read the papers from this meeting first, so they know what’s happened.’
‘Good God!’ exclaims Silja. ‘You mean there are going to be more of these meetings?’
‘I thought we could have one a week,’ says Ulli.
‘Really, Ulli,’ says Pappy, ‘don’t you think that will be a lot of paperwork?’
‘I don’t mind!’ sings out Ulli. ‘And I’m the secretary. Now I say that this meeting is shut.’
‘I declare this meeting closed,’ Pappy corrects her.
‘You can have the rest of the cake now.’
There’s a conversation Ulli can’t quite remember. It swims like a fish under thick ice. Does she really want to remember it? When did it take place? The last time she went home? No. There was nothing special about that weekend visit, except that it was the last one. Months and months later, when Ulli finally allowed herself to realize that she wasn’t going back, its ordinariness became as sharp and final as that of an old photograph found in the drawer of a chest you’ve just bought in an auction room, which must have belonged to people you can’t possibly trace.
It must have been the time before.
Silja, sitting in the kitchen with both hands wrapped round a smoking mug of black coffee. Her face is pinched, but puffy around the eyes. She is not well. It’s nothing serious, just diarrhoea, but she can’t seem to shake it off. She’s lost a couple of kilos since the beginning of the week. Luckily Ulli is at home to look after her.
The house is very quiet. The boys don’t come home very often. Pekka is studying in Stockholm. Jorma is in Berlin. He loves it there. Ulli doubts if he will come back. He has a German girlfriend and an incredibly cheap apartment not too far from the Free University. Kai has made a complete balls-up of his future so far, and he is working as a lumberjack near the Russian border. Far enough from home, thinks Ulli. Not such a balls-up after all, whatever Pappy thinks.
Ulli has heard her mother vomiting last night.
‘You weren’t being sick yesterday, were you?’ she asks. ‘Don’t you think you ought to go to the doctor?’
Her mother sips the coffee.
‘I’m a lot better this morning,’ she says, and her yellowish-white face creases into a smile. ‘Last night I just wanted to die.’
‘Yes, I know, I hate being sick,’ agrees Ulli sympathetically.
‘No,’ says her mother, ‘I mean really. I wanted to die.’
‘It’s the virus,’ says Ulli. ‘It depresses your system.’
‘In that case,’ says Ulli’s mother, ‘I’ve had this virus for a long time.’
Ulli does not say anything. She sits frozen. She does not want to ask any of the questions which her mother has just invited. For years she has wished that she and Silja were the sort of mother and daughter who would sit in the kitchen over coffee, talking about their lives. Now that it has come, she is terrified.
‘I thought I was over all that,’ continues Silja. ‘It used to be awful sometimes, when you were little. Every day, at some time, morning or evening, I’d think it. “I want to die.” It was ridiculous really. I mean, there wasn’t any reason. I suppose I must have thought that everybody felt like that. I never told anybody. You didn’t have so many articles in magazines then, when you were little. Articles which explained things like that.’
‘How old was I?’ asks Ulli.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Six, seven, eight – maybe nine. Then it got better. It started to get better.’
The kitchen is silent. Her mother drinks the coffee. As she does so, a little colour flushes her cheeks. She is starting to look a bit better. She gets up and pulls her dressing-gown around her.
‘I’ll have a shower and wash my hair,’ she says. ‘And for goodness sake, Ulli, make yourself a proper breakfast. There’s ham in the fridge, and some Edam with caraway seeds, the kind you like.’
‘Shall I make you something? Do you feel up to it?’
‘No, don’t bother. I’ll have something later.’
She goes out. The kitchen glitters with sunlight, oozes with the strong fresh light of a summer’s morning. Only one more day, thinks Ulli. About twelve waking hours. Nothing can happen in one day. She thinks of the wooden house she shares with four fellow-students. Her bed is waiting for her, rucked-up and unmade. She’ll prepare a casserole, layers of potatoes with dill and anchovies. They’ll go out to the students’ club, and when they leave in the early hours it’ll be broad daylight again and they’ll walk home along the river with the sun gathering strength and warming their bare arms and legs. They’ll have coffee and cakes at the bar on the corner. Not much money left, but it doesn’t matter. Ulli realizes that she has been holding her breath.
The sun pours over her legs, which are already brown, which will be dark and perfect before the summer ends.
North Sea Crossing
Carl wakes at six. There are shadows on the ceiling, bright sloppings of sea. Or do you call it a ceiling, when it’s a boat? He lies tight under the quilt and watches the room heave. His throat aches, but he knows it’s not seasickness.
‘You can’t be seasick. I’ve never known it so calm.’
The boat gives a lunge like a selfish sleeper turning over in bed, dragging the quilt with it. His father is buried in the opposite bunk. He never twitches or snores. Once Carl talked about a dream he’d had, and his father said, ‘I never dream.’ The second his father wakes he starts doing things.
On one elbow, leaning, twisting, Carl watches the water. It’s navy, like school uniform, with foam frisking about on top of the slabs of sea. Even through the oblong misted window the sea is much bigger than the boat. He’ll get up. He’ll go and explore. He’ll walk right round the decks and come back knowing more about the boat than his father.
‘Hey Dad,’ he’ll say, ‘guess what I saw up on deck!’ and then his father’s waking face will crease into a smile of approval.
No. Much better to go out, come back, say nothing. Later, maybe, if his father asks, he could say, ‘Oh, I thought I’d have a look up on deck.’ That way it won’t be like running to him saying, ‘Look at me! Look what I’ve been doing.’ His father doesn’t like that.
‘Just do it, Carl. Don’t tell the world about it.’
Remember when he’d thought it was a good idea to go out and chop logs. He’d haul in a basket of clean-cut logs, all the same size, enough to keep the fire going for two days. ‘Did you do those, Carl?’ ‘Yes, Dad. Thought we were getting low.’ ‘Good. Well done.’ But the wood was damp and slippery. When Carl brought down the axe it skidded on the bark and the lump of wood bounced away off the chopping block. And then his father was suddenly there, watching.
‘What the hell are you supposed to be doing?’
‘I’m chopping some logs, Dad – I just thought –’
‘That wood’s green. It won’t be ready to burn for another year.’
Carl saw his
father looking at the mangled wood. ‘Next time, ask,’ he said.
A small thought wriggles across the ceiling where the sea patterns had played. Why won’t his father have central heating like everyone else? Like Mum? No, it has to be a real fire. ‘Warm soup swilling round metal pipes – who wants that when they could have a real fire.’ The quilt has slipped off his feet. They’re long and bony and they look as if they belong to someone else. The feet Carl used to have don’t exist any more. Someone has taken away their firm, compact shape. Now he trips over things and stubs his toes. Last night he hit his big toe so hard against the step to the cabin bathroom that he thought it was broken. He sat on the bunk, nursing it. His toe was red and there was a lump on it that hadn’t been there before. The kind of lump a broken bone makes, poking out. If he sucked it … He leaned forward, screwed his face round and hoisted up his knee, but he couldn’t get his foot in his mouth any more. And it used to be so nice doing that, sending little shivers up the sole of his foot into his spine as he sucked and licked. What if he twisted round a bit more and braced his back against the end of the bunk … And there he was, knotted, when Dad came back to the cabin. He didn’t say anything, just looked while Carl untangled himself like a badly tied shoelace.
There’s no more sun on the ceiling. Everything has turned grey, and the sea is quieter, but as close at the window as a bully calling round after school. Its folds look greasy. It’s settling down just like Dad said it would. Carl swings his legs and feels for the floor, which thrusts up at his feet like someone pretending to punch you and then pulling back: ‘You really thought I was going to hit you, didn’t you? You were scared!’
Anyway, he’ll be first washed and dressed. The shower is quite nice, then its trickle of water suddenly burns and makes Carl yelp. But it’s all right. Dad can’t have heard through the door. Carl comes out, hair slicked back, teeth immaculate. Dad can’t stand mossy teeth. Now a thick whiteness is flattening the water. Fog. A second later the boat gives a long scared Mooo. ‘Fog,’ says Carl to himself. ‘Fog at sea.’ He looks round at the neatness of the cabin. Everything is stacked and folded; even his father is folded away under the quilt, sleeping so well you wouldn’t guess he was breathing. ‘It’s just like being in a ship’s cabin,’ thinks Carl, delighted. He loves things to be exactly as they should be, no more and no less. But his father has woken up. It wasn’t me, it was the foghorn, thinks Carl. He finds he is saying it aloud.
‘I know a foghorn when I hear one,’ says his father. Then he is out of bed, standing naked at the window. He always sleeps naked. Carl watches the shadow of his father’s genitals as he stands there, legs braced, staring knowledgeably into the fog. He reaches round a hand to scratch his buttock. His arms are long. In a minute he’ll turn round. Carl looks down. He fusses with the pillow, buffing it up, but as he does so he catches the snake of his father’s backward glance.
‘What are you doing that for? Can’t you leave things alone?’ This time his father doesn’t say it, but by now the words say themselves anyway, inside Carl’s head.
His father wears a watch on his naked body. Now he looks at it.
‘They start serving breakfast in quarter of an hour. Stoke up and it’ll keep you going. You can eat as much as you want – it’s all in the price.’
Carl has read the breakfast list outside the restaurant. Eggs, cheese, ham, bacon, cereals, toast, rolls, jams, marmalade, as many refills of coffee and tea as you want. ‘It’s a real bargain,’ said the woman reading it beside him. ‘But only worth it if you eat a big breakfast.’ Then she smiled at him. ‘I’m sure that won’t be a problem.’ Why can’t they go to the cafeteria? There you can buy a mini box of cornflakes and a giant Coke. In the restaurant he’ll have to eat and eat until he feels sick to make it worth the money.
‘What’s the matter? Feeling queasy?’
There are tufts of hair coming out of his father’s belly. Carl doesn’t want to have to look at his father’s penis, but he can’t help it. He just can’t look anywhere else. His father’s penis is so big and dark and it’s the same colour as a bruise. And it stirs. Perhaps it’s the movement of the boat.
‘No,’ says Carl, ‘I’m not seasick at all.’ But he says it wrong. It comes out as a boast.
‘I should bloody well hope not. That sea’s as flat as a cow’s backside. But visibility’s going down,’ his father adds critically, professionally, glancing back over his shoulder at the sea as if he owns it.
They walk up the staircase to the restaurant. All that is left of the boat’s rocking is a long oily sway from side to side. Carl feels tired inside his head. There are plenty of people about, playing video games and slotting coins into snack machines, but nobody talks much. The fog presses down on them all. In the restaurant his father pays for two breakfasts and it costs nearly ten pounds. Carl starts to work out how much breakfast they must eat to justify the ten pounds. As they go past a table a baby is suddenly, silently sick, pumping out a current of red jam and wet wads of bread. Both parents lean forward at once and drop tissues over the vomit. The father takes another tissue and wipes strings of vomit from round the baby’s mouth. The baby cries weakly and the father says something, stands, scoops him out of his high-chair and carries him off, held close against his chest.
‘Have bacon and eggs,’ says Carl’s father as Carl puts rice krispies, an orange and an apple on his tray.
‘I’m going to come back again,’ says Carl quickly. He pours orange juice in a long stream from the dispenser into a half-litre glass.
‘You don’t need all that,’ says his father.
They take seats by the window, looking out at nothing. The noise of the engines is swollen by the fog, as if the boat is sailing inside a box. Carl pours the milk over his rice krispies and raises his spoon to his mouth. His father loads a fork with strips of bacon and cut-up egg. Carl’s stomach clenches. His spoon hangs in mid-air, doing nothing. His father stabs the forkful of bacon and egg towards Carl, but at that moment there is a soft ‘thuck’, a slight, infinitely dangerous noise which silences the restaurant. Its echo is louder than the echo of the huge engines. People look at one another, then quickly away. Carl notices a shiver run down the pale orange curtains. His spoon hangs, his father’s fork stays poised in its stab. The boat swings forward like a man gathering himself on a high diving-board. Carl feels his heart tip inside him, a huge tip which will overbalance him and leave him helpless on the floor at his father’s feet. Or is it the boat tipping? Someone is putting on the brakes, much too hard. Carl’s orange juice glass goes hop hip hop along the table, reaches the edge where there is a ridge to stop things sliding, and then falls on to the floor.
‘It’s all right,’ says Carl to himself, ‘it doesn’t matter. You can go back and have as much as you want once you’ve paid.’
But his father isn’t even looking at the orange juice. He is staring out of the window, listening.
‘They’ve put the engines into reverse,’ he says, but not to Carl. A man looks over from the next table. Carl’s father is a man people turn to. He always knows what’s going on. A small flush of pride warms Carl. ‘Into reverse,’ he thinks, ‘into reverse.’ The boat pushes against itself, back-pedalling. Long lumpy shivers run through it, bump bump bump as if it is riding over a cattle-grid.
‘Let’s get up on deck,’ says his father. But there’s all this breakfast on the table. Eggs, bacon, rolls, little sealed packets of cheese. His father’s coffee has sloped right over the top of his cup and run away in a thin brown stream over the table. Often Carl has thought that his father could pee black pee out of his big bruised penis.
‘Carl,’ says his father, not angrily. He is right by the boy, standing over the chair where Carl just sits and watches the stream of coffee. He puts his hands on Carl’s upper arms. He could easily lift him but he doesn’t. His hands tell Carl what he has to do, and Carl rises and leaves the table without giving the breakfast another thought. Everybody else remains at their tables, thei
r eyes following Carl and his father, and at that moment the ship’s loudspeaker system begins to honk in a language Carl doesn’t understand.
‘We’ve had a collision,’ says his father.
Carl looks up at him without speaking.
‘It’s all right. We’ll find out what’s happening.’
Behind them people are beginning to struggle up, fumbling for bags and children. There is a lady with baby twins. Carl was watching her last night. Now she staggers as she tucks one twin under her arm and wrestles the second out of his car seat.
‘Dad –’ begins Carl, but suddenly they’re moving fast, out of the restaurant and nearly at the second staircase which leads up to the deck. People are crowding up the steps. They’re not really pushing but Carl thinks that if he stopped they would keep walking over him. But his father is ahead of him and his body is wider than Carl’s, making way.
‘Hold on to my jacket,’ says his father, and Carl gets hold of it with both hands. People dig into him on both sides but he keeps moving, carried up the narrow stairs holding on to his father’s jacket. No one would be able to walk over his father. The heavy doors to the deck have been wedged back and they squeeze through, grabbing at the white space beyond.
They are up on deck. An edgy mass of people flows to the rails, but there is nothing to be seen. Only fog, licking right up to the edge of the boat. None of the people round him are speaking English. More sound spurts out of the speakers, but it is twisted up like bad handwriting and Carl can’t understand a word.
‘It’s OK,’ says Carl’s father. ‘We ran down a yacht in the fog. They’ve put a boat out from the other side.’
The crowd ripples as the news passes over it. It’s all right. No danger to passengers. We’ve stopped to pick up the crew, that’s all. And the hot panicky feeling rolls away into the fog. The lady with her twins is up on deck, and now people are eager to help her. Another lady holds out her hands to take one of the babies, hoists him into her arms and joggles him to make him smile. People find they have still got bits of breakfast in their hands, and those who have picked up life-jackets let them dangle as if they’re of no importance at all.
Love of Fat Men Page 11