by Roy Jacobsen
“There, there, it’ll be alright.”
This was the very worst thing she could have said, in the worst possible tone:
“What will be alright?” I shrieked. “What will be alright?”
I was like a casualty in a cheap soap opera, staring imploringly into the summery face of placid Marlene the Wise, and I thought I saw the all-too-clear signs that she was wondering how much I knew, or how little, and how much I could take, then she decided on the best course of action, still beset by doubts, I later concluded, she straightened up and said roughly:
“Pull yourself together now, Finn. Your mother needs a few days on her own. And it’s about time too. Come on.”
She took three steps along the path through the rustling hazelnut coppice and turned and held out her hand and repeated in a manner that brooked neither disagreement nor discussion that I should come and show her the camp site, without further ado.
Yes, if there is anyone you can rely on in this world, it is Marlene. Marlene is a rock, like Mother used to be, not a fickle dove in a storm whose composure can crumble any day of the week, Marlene is as solid as the ground you walk on, round the clock. She never lets you down, she is always even-tempered and she doesn’t know the meaning of fear, she is the type of mother we should have had. Look how she dealt with Boris, for example. He was already up at our camp site sounding off about his local knowledge to Jan, but Marlene knew how to cope with him.
“Run along and play with someone else now, Boris,” she said with the same intractable smile. “I have to have a little chat with Finn. I’ve got a letter for you,” she called in my direction.
Yes, and Boris made himself scarce without any fuss, and I was free to show them how the primus worked, the one we had been given by Uncle Oskar for Christmas, pump here, open the valve, meths, light up and so on, a letter did you say?
I had forgotten it, my plan. The letter was from Freddy 1 the first letter I had received in my life, if we exclude the one that accompanied Linda, but I assume that had been intended for Mother anyway, and even though the one from Freddy 1 could not exactly be classified as a normal letter, with an envelope, stamp, addressee and all that, it was at least a folded sheet of paper with a ragged margin left by the spiral and two lines of quite elegant, dark blue capital letters: “I’M NOT GOING ON HOLIDAY. I’LL LOOK AFTER THE BALL BEARINGS.”
So Marlene knew about my plan, which basically had been to get Kristian to call on Freddy 1 and give him the leather pouch with the ball bearings in exchange for him agreeing to catch the boat and come out and sleep under the awning with me, where I had been alone while Mother and Linda occupied the main part of the tent.
If Marlene had imagined that this rejection by Freddy 1 might take my mind off Mother’s departure, she was quite right. However, I realised something else as well, I realised that neither Kristian nor Marlene had put much effort into persuading Freddy 1, on the contrary, they had accepted his refusal as a reasonable end to the matter, after consultation with Mother, maybe, which in turn meant that Kristian must have betrayed our secret, that was the kind of person Freddy 1 was, he inspired people to exclude him, and that made me furious. At the same time I knew that I would not have seen through this game if I had received his letter yesterday, when everything was normal, there’s something odd about his eyes, Mother had said once, with an unmistakable wince.
I hated that.
So I decided to keep my distance, also from Marlene, and Jan. But now there he was, in a short-sleeved, blue and white striped jumper, showing us how dry ice was so cold it could burn, look at this, a chunk was dropped into the bucket of water, and it didn’t melt, it made the water boil because it brought together extreme opposites, a mystery it was impossible not to be fascinated by. I ran to fetch Boris, who didn’t know about dry ice either, and we experimented with it until Marlene said that if we didn’t stop there was a good chance we would be drinking warm milk for the rest of the week.
When Boris and I left Daisy, later, I at once began to tell him about Freddy 1, because I could not fail Freddy 1 the way Mother had failed me, and I talked about what he liked and didn’t like, what he could do and what he couldn’t do, I let words tumble out, one after the other, and I continued when we were down on the beach to swim and catch crabs, lying on the bare rock-face staring up at the sky I talked about Freddy 1, for there were very few people on this earth who could measure up to Freddy 1.
Boris too had a Freddy 1, he talked about him while we kicked a football around or lay watching F.T.B., and especially when we did dangerous things, for example when on one occasion we were on our way down from the crag above F.T.B. and bumped into Hans, the warden, who loomed up on the path and stared daggers at us, which is where I discovered that Boris did not exhibit the slightest sign of fear, he cold-bloodedly returned the glare, until I realised that it wasn’t us who had been caught red-handed but Hans, a grown man, who is a lot more blameworthy in anyone’s book than a child.
Yes, it wasn’t only us who were going through this experience, there were also the friends we could never let down. Such as when we swam across the bay to sit on the big rock to avoid being with Linda and Marlene who, day after day, lay on the spot Mother had colonised, Linda who could swim like a submarine now, without a swimming belt, in the shallow water, surfacing only to breathe, and that was not often, and then stood laughing with closed eyes and the tip of her tongue carefully licking the corner of her mouth to taste the terrible salt water; as the days went by she became browner and browner, browner than me, on the parts of the body not covered by a bathing costume. She also became more agile and climbed after us in places where less than a week ago we could have been certain we would have been left in peace, she ran over beaches and fields without looking too ungainly, soon with such calloused soles that she could also walk on forest paths and piles of barnacles without displaying the stupid barefoot-walk that is so prevalent on Norwegian beaches. Traveller children have soles like wood. They don’t bat an eyelid. Travellers, gypsies and Indians. With grimy faces, bleached, bristly salt-water hair, grazes on their elbows and knees and scratched insect bites. While our eyes just became bluer and bluer as the summer wore on, the most everlasting of all summers.
15
More dry ice arrived. Food arrived, in varying quantities at surprising times. A blacked-out boat arrived at night with alcohol, which Hans knew about but did nothing to hinder. All of a sudden, mackerel was being sold from a fishing boat at the quay. It was party time for the young with fires and potato races and “You Can Have Him” and a kiosk that had opened to sell Solo and sausages and lollipops. There was football and climbing, up steep rock-faces. And there was dancing for the adults, with “You Can Have Him” yet again, some sang along and some came to blows and Jan and Marlene lived out their love with disgusting, deep, French kisses. Meanwhile we sat in the darkness watching everything, Boris and Linda and I, it was our island, so much so that when we stared into the pulsating cabinet of horrors that was the dance floor for grown-ups, we were able to count at least three pairs of men’s legs with talcum-white dust up their calves.
And then of course F.T.B. also came on the scene, it just took us a while to recognise her, unfamiliar in clothes and in these alien surroundings, in a white cotton dress, and with arms and legs so tanned that they merged into the summer darkness and transformed her figure into an enormous snow-flake as she swung from one man’s arms into another’s, it wasn’t even revolting, it was how it should be, we were at one with this summer, we no longer had an age, only bodies and lungs and blood that pumped vim and vigour into the tiniest nooks and crannies of existence.
And all this time we were living in our peaceful oasis. While the rest of the tented island resembled an estate in constant departure mode, forced as the tenants were to up sticks every third day to rush off to a spot they had eyed with envy, in the hope that the tent there would be taken down, or at least that there had not been time for a queue to form in front of it, f
or a day or two they could occupy the prized site before having to dread the next move just one day later. It was obvious that since you had camped for two days on a much-coveted spot you would have to spend the next two slumming it, in order once again to seize the right to a place in the sun. These were merciless market forces which I followed with interest and privileged sympathy, through the doughty example of Boris’ family, the exotic “uncle” and the nice, talkative mother whom the “uncle” kept smearing with sun cream because she was so strangely pink and delicate and on top of that so sensitive to draughts, poor thing, plus three brothers and three “cousins”, all doomed to a restless nomadic existence that ensured that only one solitary day out of three would be reasonably peaceful.
“But at least that’s something,” said the “uncle” in a philosophical vein, presumably to mollify the six youngsters whose job it was to pitch and un-pitch the tent, under his imperious direction. “Uncle” gave every command with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip and ash rolling down his sweaty and ever browner belly and the tiny trunks that didn’t appear to house anything at all.
“Yep, one day in three, in fact that’s a whole week over the three weeks we’re here.”
If the system had worked, that is. And everyone knows it didn’t. Some people are more conscientious than others. With the result that even that one week often went up in smoke for those who needed it most, it was like the Trotting Stadium in fact, where those who least need the money always win, or as Freddy 1 says: “Crime pays.”
But we weren’t involved in any of this.
For once. We sat outside watching everything, from above. We moved our tent once, about half a metre, the water bag hung from the same tree throughout the summer, the fire burned within the same circle of stones – by the way, that, too, was illegal.
But since we were estate people this did not give us any sense of superiority, it was more like shame. However, the shame was never such that we felt any need to dismantle the tent and wander down to participate in the peripatetic Nazi regime on the flats. It was and remained a fitting shame, it was for internal use, in the sense that we followed Hans’ advice and did not specify where we lived, if anyone asked.
“Over there,” we said, or simply “I don’t know”.
Mother had her own take on this, she was new to the island, she said, didn’t even have a tent, ha ha …
But now she had gone and wasn’t coming back.
A few errands? A few days?
Linda mentioned her three times. When Mother wasn’t there to see her swimming with her head above the water for the first time, a sight which would even have brought tears to the eyes of Our Lord. Otherwise, she was happy with Marlene who dressed her in a summer frock and then took it off, only to put on another one, like a present that could be wrapped and unwrapped, and given and received, again and again. After a while she made two friends, of the same robust calibre as Anne-Berit across the corridor at home, older, annoying girls, who looked at her as if she were an interesting pet, a reaction which, by the way, Linda was beginning to resent, something was happening in her too, or it had already happened, such a gradual process that it was impossible to discern until it was too late and it could never be undone. Then one day Boris too was gone. Without warning.
I got up early as usual and washed under the bucket and cleaned my teeth and gave breakfast a miss, there wouldn’t have been any until Jan had woken up anyway, Jan liked a “lie-in” after all the evening visits he made to the other tents occupied by dubious characters whom Marlene greeted with very measured hellos when they spoke to her on the beach in the light of day.
I went down to the camp site and on to the bay where I knew “uncle” had made his latest territorial conquest.
But there was just a light, sickly green patch of flattened grass. I proceeded to the site at Dragevika, didn’t find any Boris there either, and walked round the whole island in the course of the next hour without success, before returning to Daisy where Marlene and Linda had got up and were sitting on a blanket having breakfast.
“Where’s Mother?” I asked.
“At home …” Marlene said evasively.
“It’s almost three weeks since she left,” I continued, a hundred per cent sure of my facts as I had seen a calendar on the quay when I was trying to work out which boat Boris could have left on.
“It may take a little while longer as …”
“What will take a little longer?”
Marlene sent me a serious look as I stood there thinking I had a right to an answer as I had not mentioned Mother one single time since she left. Somehow, not mentioning her was a way of clutching onto some faith in her, I realised now, because I didn’t receive an answer and it was as if she had gone for good.
That day it began to rain. Not for the first time. But now the heavens were opening. We sat in the tent listening to the hammering on the canvas, playing cards, and we were browner than ever before in the primus fume-saturated gloom. We played Crazy Eights, the one card game Linda knew, and we let her win until I was sick of it, because it was no longer necessary, and she had begun to take it for granted, all the things she couldn’t do, as if it did her any good, so I got up and went into the awning and put on my trunks and went down through the rain and felt the dust sticking to my feet, splashed and loped through the puddles across the sad camp sites, there wasn’t a person to be seen, down to our immortal beach, not a living soul, and nothing else either, just rain.
I waded out into the surprisingly warm water and started to swim, and I swam and swam, and this time I didn’t even turn towards the headland where before we had crawled ashore to have a look at F.T.B., but kept straight on, I was leaving, on my way from the island, from everything.
But I was not alone.
Marlene was swimming next to me, without making a sound. Marlene had got out of bed and come after me and caught me up with her superior crawl. Then she changed to breast stroke and we swam like Boris and I had, side by side. She said:
“Great, isn’t it?” without looking at me.
I saw no particular reason to look at her, either. I swam. “You’re a smart lad,” Marlene said. “You knew the whole time, didn’t you?”
I hadn’t known anything at all, but this nonsense made me see the light to the extent that I knew all I could do now was carry on doing what I was doing, swimming.
Marlene turned onto her back without losing any speed and said into the rain that was still beating down on us – the surface resembled a grey porcupine, and from the forest on both sides we heard a torrent of water crashing down on billions and billions of leaves, like an avalanche of sand and gravel and stones careering down from the sky over the forests and the sea – and Marlene said:
“Your mother is in hospital having treatment. It’s nothing serious. She just didn’t want you children to worry …”
My silence was not to be broken. I was on my back now as well, and opened my mouth for the raindrops that had grown colder while the water I was in was becoming warmer and warmer. “But perhaps that wasn’t such a good move?” Marlene continued, and with that everything went even quieter in the storm. But here at least it was possible to cry without anyone noticing. In a different tone of voice, Marlene said:
“I know I should have told you before.”
Two strokes. Three.
“Told me what?” I said.
“About your mother,” she said.
“Oh, that,” I said, feeling an unfamiliar toughness beginning to take shape. It was about time. The determination that this should never be allowed to repeat itself, the hatred and the bitterness at not being able to decide whether to thrust a knife in her or start to weep so that she could console me like a second Linda, for I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.
16
This is what it is like being on holiday. It makes you begin to see that you could have been someone else, had you only lived somewhere else,
been surrounded by different people and houses from those that stand on either side of Traverveien like two intrepid mountain ranges containing mothers and sons and treachery and friendship. It is a deep revolutionary insight. You could say it was a warning sign, both the onset of a collapse and a new beginning.
We got up in the sun that always shines after the rain has done its job and discovered that for the first time we could see over to the mainland, through fresh, clear air. I showed Freddy 1 the kingdom of the eagle owl, the bird that can see into the future and therefore has no reason to live, yet it does. I showed him the dragon and F.T.B. and the football pitch and taught him to dribble with a ball, and we were always in the same team, The Gang F.C. I had become a Boris, initiating an invisible friend into all and sundry and not telling that stupid little sister a thing, Linda, who didn’t talk about Mother at all now and was incapable of experiencing the loss and the fury that I felt. I was nursing a secret, it was expanding and contracting inside me, like a pulse, great days, I suppose I have to admit that, we had become veterans who caught mooring ropes and positioned the gangplank and laughed at the helpless new arrivals, and I came to the realisation that if you are in any doubt as to whether you are any good, you just have to ask yourself if you are able to keep a secret that is bursting inside you, someone else’s secret.
Then summer was over.
The boat was leaving. Our boat. We had seen hundreds of departures and this had made us think. Travelling home from an island like this is like carrying a grand piano from a condemned house, the past is irrevocable, childhood is over and all hope is gone – I arrived a month ago an innocent, naïve and happy child. With a mother. I am travelling back home as a cynical orphan, hanging over the railings, and staring down into the frothing wake from the chugging hulk of rust overcrowded with ignorant, sun-sated holidaymakers along the Nesodden peninsula.