Jasmine.
Know the plants, it’s what he told the kids.
On Tuesday afternoon, he got back from work and found an Amazon package waiting with the mail. A DVD of Aladdin. The back cover told him that Aladdin’s girlfriend was called Jasmine. Again, he saw Spencer P’s smug face, spluttering now as he throttled the little bastard.
Then Eggers appeared earlier than usual on Thursday to pick him up. He left him in the kitchen and went for a shower, a sudden suspicion making him creep downstairs. A cupboard door was open. Behind it was Eggers, rubbing a particularly scented hand cream around the rims of his mugs.
‘You swine. I’ve been freaking out! I thought it was Spencer P.’
‘Spencer? Why would it be him? And why do you call him Spencer P? He’s not a fuckin rapper.’
Thursday they finished early, Boss Hogg with a mysterious appointment that Eggers knew all about, damn straight, a girl named Sue and a husband far away. They stayed in town, a few beers in the park. It was Jonas’s idea to hire a boat at the lake, working the oars as Eggers worked the Stella: six cans in forty-five minutes. He fell asleep with his head on the stern.
Jonas paddled quietly to shore, removed the oars and gently pushed the boat back out.
‘You fucker!’
‘Swim for it.’
‘Sod off!’
‘Nice day for a swim.’
‘Jonas.’
‘Did you break into my house and have a bath?’
‘You on about that again?’
‘I can leave or I can come and tow you in. Easy is.’
‘Easy AS, you knob!’
‘That’s hardly the attitude.’
‘Look. I didn’t break into your house and have a bath. Are you insane? Why would anyone do that?’
That night Jonas dreamt of boats. These dreams that came in cycles, a psychic turning every six months or so. Tonight there was no rabbit and no child. But still blood. There was always blood.
He was crouched on the shore of a vast sea, scrubbing his sticky red hands. Eggers rowed back and forth, shouting come and join me, Jonas. Big Haakon appeared in a deerskin coracle. Then Axel in a dinghy, someone new each time he looked: family and school friends, teaching colleagues, all in different vessels, canoes and skiffs, tug boats, all shouting come and join me, Jonas. He shook his head, shouting that he couldn’t, he had to clean his hands.
And then Mary. A gondola parting the throng, beckoning to him. Jonas smiled and the blood was gone. A rowing boat materialised but before he could push it out a storm blew up, obscuring everyone. The last thing he saw was the Hirtshals night ferry, Eva and Anya.
He woke late, just after seven. Outside, Eggers was blasting the horn, shattering the last dream-image. Mary, beckoning him. He felt an old, old sensation and stepped into the day.
‘You pulling your pud in there?’
‘I did dream about you last night.’
Eggers gunned the van and smirked. ‘Wet dream, eh?’
‘Wet as your boots.’
The smirk vanished. Eggers slammed the gear into second. He was wearing an old pair of boots. Why he waded to the lakeside without taking off his boots remained a mystery.
Eggers said nothing for the rest of the drive to the ring road. In the silence, Jonas thought about boats; the Skagerrak trawlers and the weekend dinghies, the big boys permitted by parents to cast darrows for the mackerel, far out in their rowing boats and Jonas so envious.
The job pressed. Flashbacks in the heat. Naples. Summer of ’02, working the roads for the mafia gangs. A similar clinging dust, jackhammers still ringing as he tried to sleep in that broiling shack. And the Italians were always pissed off about something. The English were much quieter.
Apart from Boss Hogg. A big-bellied cowboy in a white hard hat. Move your delicate arse and move it now, back into that hard sun, the ring road a tightening noose and the traffic stunning. In Norway you could drive miles without meeting another car. Here, the busier the road the faster the drivers, hair trigger primed when forced to slow down. Jonas couldn’t imagine a Norwegian opening a conversation with an account of the route taken and why, the other options, that swine of a junction twelve bottleneck. All these lives boxed in hot metal.
He stuck to boats. Canal barges on the heat-hazed river that curved under the road bridge, half a mile downhill from the fix site. A rhythm locked on, a shovel of tar and a glance at the river, the hard sun glinting, broken, white mirrors on the black roofs of the moored boats.
He had lunch down there. Slumber-time by the moving stillness, feet in the water and eyes closed. When he opened them years had passed, a rowing boat on the far bank and two kids dangling bow lines. Let’s call them Jonas and Axel. Big Haakon keeping a wary eye, a benevolent giant.
Haakon was the first to take them out on the water, Jonas’s dad interested only in his golf handicap and Axel’s in the ice hockey he excelled at before the booze. They once tried to settle on one word that summed up what their fathers thought of them. It took a while.
Bothersome.
Haakon taught them about fishing with the same easy patience he taught them about plants and trees. Simple things like telling a mackerel from a herring by the patterns on their backs, hookless techniques like worm-blobs for catching eels, more scientific stuff like image refraction. Always kneel when you’re fishing. Remember to keep your shadow off the water.
Axel chose Big Haakon’s rowing boat as the getaway vessel when he ran away. Haakon said nothing but knew he was camping wild on the forested island on the other side of the point.
Aegir’s Isle. They named it after the Norse god of the sea. For three nights Jonas sneaked out, Axel rowing across to get him. They sat by the fire, eating tinned sardines and honing the design of the hut that would let them live there permanently. It was easy to believe, back then, that freedom was as simple as choosing it. No one had told them about dreams, all those faces, like a series of last visits and who knows when the Big Black would finally fall.
A coot shrieked. Jonas flinched and watched the moorhen flee. The rowing boat boys pulled up their lines. Two crayfish they smashed on the gunwale. He couldn’t hold back the traffic, the noose, tighter and louder. He heard the storm and saw the night ferry again, Larvik to Hirtshals, Eva and Anya and a hollowness in his gut. The sun dimmed and he shivered.
It was unsettling how something which never happened somehow persisted as dark patches on memory’s big canvas, so that nothing remembered was certain, not even the jewels hidden away and protected so closely.
‘Bergen?’
‘Yes,’ said Jonas.
‘I remember Bergen.’
‘It must have been different then.’
‘Who knows, I’ve never been back. Might not have changed a bit. Those houses by the harbour, ancient they were. Maybe the place hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. Certainly seemed like that when the night-lights were on. Reflections on the water. Nothing like it, Jonas.’
‘I remember it well.’
‘If you remember it then what are you doing here?’
‘I could ask the same.’
But Jonas never did. To know the end of the story was to end its telling, and the telling was the reason he sought out old Sam tonight as on so many others. Sam meant Bergen.
Again, Jonas let Sam’s story lull and take him, until somehow it could be his own and then was.
‘I had a woman there.’
‘There’s always a woman.’
‘Blonde hair. Right down her back. I had two nights there while the boat was loaded, some fleapit up by the cathedral.’
‘St. Olav’s.’
‘That’s the one. She worked in a bar.’
Logen’s, Jonas remembered.
‘She was... passionate, I tell you that.’
‘That’s Norwegians for you!’
‘Yeah. You Norwegians, you’re so passionate, eh?’
A slicing voice. Jonas looked up into the red face and buzz-cut hair of s
omeone he didn’t know.
‘Come again?’
‘Exactly! Sex, s’all you think about.’
Buzz Cut’s fat friend started giggling, an odd nasal snuffle, eyes tight shut with cartoon lines.
‘Come on now, John,’ said Sam. ‘Let Jonas be.’
Buzz Cut put an arm round the old man’s shoulders. ‘No worries, just having a laugh with the Viking.’
He popped a cigarette into his mouth and grinned. Jonas watched him walk away. He didn’t know this person. That licence to condescend to a stranger, where do you apply for it?
Sam too watched Buzz Cut but didn’t see him, his gaze stalled somewhere in the middle distance. ‘I was going to stay there, you know. Do something or other. But I didn’t. You know the damnedest thing? I can’t even remember her name. I can’t see her face, can’t see it.’
He expected, did Jonas. Likely, he expected too much, but rather expect and be disappointed than doubt and be cynical. But even Jonas did not expect old Sam. The first time he heard this story was in The Lion, a few weeks after he moved to the village. Standing at the bar ordering a beer. Sam leaned in and asked in Swedish what his name was. Jonas’s mouth did the cartoon drop. In English, he replied that he was Norwegian and nearly fell over when the question was repeated in his own language. Old Sam explained that he’d sailed the Newcastle-Bergen route for over thirty years. Merchant Navy, engineer second class.
The old man knew: the steep cobbles and fussy window boxes of Nordnes; the phosphorescent winter glow of those white-panelled houses; the mist on Mt Fløyen as ethereal as a Japanese landscape. And Jonas knew Sam’s lost woman too, the barmaid with the blonde hair and the way she turned and winked and, quick-shifting, became his wife, Eva, and every time a different moment and now that evening of the REM tribute band and afterwards a bottle of wine in Byparken and singing Man on the Moon as the man himself looks down from his full whiteness in the east and yes, I see him, Jonas, I’ve never noticed him before…
‘You should have got married, Jonas.’
‘It never happened for me.’
The old man suspected, of course. He tapped Jonas on the hand. ‘There’s time for everything.’
It troubled him, the way Eva had retreated to the edge of the light. Once upon a more fragile time he dreamed of her every night. Yet now it sometimes felt he had to remember to remember. Where there was presence there was still existence. Something like that.
‘Are you a dreaming man?’
‘Haven’t had a dream in years,’ said Sam.
‘Think they mean anything?’
‘They can mean whatever you bloody well please. No point in worrying about the damn things.’
Jonas downed the last of his pint. His mother flashed across his mind; if you keep worrying like that your head will fall off. Seven years old, this had, of course, worried him even more.
He ordered two more beers and leaned on the bar. Buzz Cut fixed a stare, OTT and making Jonas giggle, a little boy’s laugh lost in the shouts from the pool table and the sudden laughter, the undulating rush of the football crowd on the TV. Meaning meant nothing in this hubbub. He liked the word hubbub. And skewed by a booze-marched goodwill, he gave in to the moment and bought a couple of brandies. Carpe diem and all that crap.
‘Your good health.’
‘Skål,’ said Sam. ‘What are we toasting?’
‘The present.’
‘To the present!’
And Jonas walked again with old Sam through the streets of Bergen, arm in arm with Eva and their daughter in tow. There were boats in the harbour, modern cruisers and dark-wood yachts, the kind they promised themselves when they retired. Cruel whalers too, readying for the north Atlantic. Anya once asked about them and cried when he explained. Why do they do that, daddy? Another one who sought meaning, poor thing, another who’d see whatever she wanted in a silly dream about lots of boats, whatever she damn well pleased.
‘I meant to ask, Jonas. Did you see that news story about the Norwegian who always takes a ladder to the supermarket?’
‘Can’t say I did.’
‘It’s because the food prices are really high.’
Jonas was confused. Then he got it. Sam was laughing, he laughed with his whole body, shoulders shunting up and down, an old locomotive picking up speed. That set Jonas off and people were looking and smiling and all was good. When he opened his eyes again, she was there.
Eleven
It was a spur of the moment decision. Mary didn’t make these too often and wouldn’t be making another anytime soon. Jonas started laughing just as she reached the table and for a paranoid moment she thought he was laughing at her. She stood awkwardly, there for the world to see in her supermarket uniform with the misspelt name badge (Marie). She smiled nervously when he finally noticed her, a smile becoming a rictus as the look in his eyes veered from surprise to panic. Somebody else laughed then. And this time it probably was directed at her.
That morning Mary ran her standard 10k. Down the old main road to the small industrial estate by the dual carriageway, turning and retracing her steps, back through the village and out west.
She liked the quiet of the single-track, the view of rooftops and church spire when she turned again at the new housing development. Another kilometre and she upped the pace, driving the arms. She needed to properly sweat, feel it running down her neck and back, soaking her Lycra top. Again she stepped up the pace and felt like she could run all day, day into night and why not, far into the blue-black distance, smooth as a stone across a lake.
The Post Office marked the 10k. Forty-six minutes. Not too shabby but a minute off her best. She’d kicked too soon and paid the price. She stretched as she caught her breath, held the back of each foot and stretched the thighs, reading the small ads in the Post Office window.
Cleaner wanted. Call Jonas on 07871 399747.
Mary remembered and cringed. You’ve got a lot of blues, Jonas. An overt flirt if ever there was. Bad Mary, it couldn’t have been more obvious if she’d stuck her bum out and peered over her shoulder, finger to her pouting mouth. She blamed the wine. And it wasn’t as if she even fancied him. He was just a nice, generous man, a bit eccentric but genuinely nice.
These basic traits extracted, Mary had filed him away under like. She’d done this forever, with everyone she met, long before Facebook made a fetish out of arbitrary judgement.
The lack of consistency in her criteria didn’t bother her. Facebook was right, it was a gut thing. It had been the same at the supermarket. In three months of working there she’d got to know Daisy, Meg and Debbie. Daisy and Meg she didn’t like, for no particular reason, she just didn’t. So they only got small-talk. Lucky Debbie, on the other hand, she did like, which meant Mary occasionally shared more personal confidences, little hints, but only hints.
She laughed and a passing group of school-kids sniggered. Over-analysing, it was a bloody illness. Mary jogged home and made an omelette (whites only) while her husband assembled his own breakfast (big and fried). He and his big belly held court, telling her that he didn’t need to flap around the streets like Paula bloody Radcliffe because the doctor had told him his BP was normal, cholesterol fine and if he had his liver checked that’d be just fine too.
‘When did you go to the doctor?’
‘I had that mole.’
‘That was years ago!’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘Well, what?’
‘Well, I’m just the same.’
She rolled her eyes, knew she was doing it but kept on. Her husband, in turn, rolled his.
As she stared into space, she found herself wondering what Jonas ate for breakfast. If he too had just carefully constructed a sandwich of bacon, sausage and egg, slathered in brown sauce, then any comparison with her husband edged towards one of like with like and a disappointed anti-climax. If, on the other hand, he was eating something different, like a grapefruit, or porridge, then she was looking at a different kind of comparison
altogether.
That got her thinking about the advert. Her husband was wiping brown sauce from his chin.
And so, hours later, Mary was standing in front of Jonas in The Black Lion in her supermarket uniform. He seemed nervous and that made her even more self-conscious. The awkwardness continued as they silently watched Old Sam shuffle across to the toilets. Jonas invited her to sit down and for a moment she thought about asking him what he ate for breakfast.
‘Do you have any... experience,’ he said.
‘Of cleaning?’
‘Yes.’
‘My own or others?’
‘Eh?’
‘Twenty-two years a wife.’ She blushed when she said it. Wife, as if she had to make that fact clear.
‘I see. And what... attracts you to the job?’
‘Are you serious?’
Jonas visibly relaxed, shaking his head and smiling. ‘You’re right. I don’t have a clue about all this.’
Twelve
Fletcher sat in the over-hot confessional. An unusual tang clung to the air, old sweat mixed with something else, sour yet floral. Is this the smell of sin? He should ask the priest on the other side of the mesh. The man was irritating him, a reedy wheedle of a voice that set his teeth on edge. But the irritation was more than offset by the thought of his aunt’s abject horror at him sitting where he was. She said Catholics had killed God. Quite the claim, but that was his aunt.
The priest droned on, the head bowed, now and then a question, a full-face glimpse as he turned to wait for the response. The grave, over-studied demeanour jarred with the spouted inanities and Fletcher’s anger was sudden, familiar. He wondered what it would be like to stab the priest in the eye, through the mesh.
‘Thank you, Father.’
‘There’s no need to call me Father.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s just no need.’
Fletcher left the confessional and crossed to the main door of the church. He let it squeak open and shut but stayed inside. The confessional opened a few moments later. The priest appeared, stretching his arms and yawning, a shake of the head and a vague little smile. Then he noticed Fletcher and froze, arms still outstretched. Fletcher stared at him then left.
A Private Haunting Page 6