I stepped back a few paces and walked round the house to see if maybe a window had been left open that we could crawl in through, it was a single-storey house, and I could do that, I wasn’t an invalid, but all the windows were closed. My father stood on the steps, almost paralysed, he had no ace up his sleeve. I walked down the footpath staring at the ground all the way down to the postboxes and back up again, and I could see the man from the house next door slowly making his way to the hedge that separated the small plots. I held back for a second, I didn’t like the man, didn’t like his eyes, but then I went over to the hedge anyway. He stopped, the hedge reached up to his crotch and was meticulously trimmed on his side, his half of the hedge, while on my father’s side it was untended and reached up to my waist, it looked stupid, looked petty, and he said:
‘Nice weather we’re having.’
I looked up. The weather had been fine this morning, but right now heavy clouds hung over the countryside.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Is that right,’ he said, and I thought, he is a sly bastard, I know his kind. I can’t deal with that now.
‘They’re in the postbox,’ he said.
‘What,’ I said. ‘In his postbox.’
‘No, in my postbox, the keys, that’s where he put them.’
‘Why didn’t you say that straight away. We’ve been going round looking for them. You saw us.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Why didn’t you put them in his postbox so he could find them.’
‘Why should I.’
‘No, why should you,’ I said, and I turned and walked down to the postboxes, and behind me he muttered, goddamn drunk, why the hell should I, but there were lots of postboxes, not just the two, and down the road there was a whole row of houses one after the other, and the postboxes were all in a line, and the next-door neighbour hadn’t told me what his name was, so I didn’t know which box to look in, and it was the same as always, I had to put my hand in every damn box all the way along before I found the keys, and with my finger through the keyring I went back up, and the man was standing behind the hedge with a broad smile on his face, and I crossed the lawn to the hedge and stopped close to him and said to his face:
‘You prick,’ and he said:
‘Always happy to lend a helping hand,’ and put three fingers to his temple like a Boy Scout, grinned and walked up to his house, and I heard him muttering, goddamn drunk, and I walked towards my father on the doorstep, put the key in the lock and opened the door.
I had never seen anything like it. This was not good. He forced his way past me and kicked the cardboard boxes and rubbish and all sorts of unspeakable things to both sides, clearing a path, and kicked the worn-out, paint-stained shoes at the wall, and the clothes lying on the floor he also kicked away, and they were filthy clothes he hadn’t worn for a long time, and even though his gait was unsteady, there was still a snap to his kick and a good technique, it was a gift from heaven, that kick, or from hell, and also there was an unusually large number of scuffed shoes lying around in the little porch and most of them were old with their tips worn thin, and what was he collecting them for, right inside the door. And everywhere there was rubbish in plastic bags which had never got across the doorstep nor down to the road, and most wasn’t even in a bag but was tossed around, so the floor was covered with litter, and an evil smell drifted in through the open doors of two other rooms, from the bathroom and what must have been the room where he slept with the windows closed, and it was disgusting to think that he could sleep in that room, and the worst was the foul, numbing, ominous stench wafting in from the kitchen, where my father stood by the door waving me in, saying:
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Come in, coffee’s on its way, I’ve put the kettle on, it won’t be long before the water’s hot, I’ve got this really good stove, you know, you can have it like you did when you were small, take off your coat then, oh, it’s elegant, it is, it must have cost serious money, Jesus Christ in Heaven, you can’t deny it,’ and I thought, yes, yes, it did cost serious money, and in fact a good deal of what I owned cost serious money, lots of money, that’s how it had turned out, and most things I bought, they gave me nothing, I just bought them, and now there were two or three of them in every room, there were paintings I never noticed hanging on the walls in the house where I lived alone, and I had the latest fashion in furniture, and antiques, and designer jugs made of glass or steel or both, and blenders, Italian ashtrays, and I didn’t see them, not a single one, and I didn’t use any of them and couldn’t even remember where I had bought them. But I kept my coat on. I was not staying in my father’s house.
I walked through the hall to the kitchen door, past all the debris, and into the kitchen and forced my eyes out of focus and was about to sit down when he said, be careful with that coat, Tommy, and he put a strangely untouched copy of a glossy housekeeping magazine on a stool and spread it open before I sat down.
He had put instant coffee in my cup, and the water was already boiling, it was quick, he was right about that, and then he filled my cup, and the cup could have been cleaner.
‘You’re limping,’ I said, and why on earth did I say that now, it just slipped out, and I could have bitten my tongue off, filled my mouth with pebbles until my teeth crunched, knocked my brain off its stem.
He turned his face away and looked at the wall.
‘I’ve limped for many years. I broke my leg some time in the Seventies, it was. It wouldn’t heal properly afterwards. A car drove into me and I landed in a ditch by Kløfta, and he just drove off, the bastard, he didn’t want to stop, no, he didn’t, he wasn’t bothered about me, I guess I didn’t look smart enough, he was from the inside, you know, from Oslo, that was easy to see, I didn’t get the number of the car or anything. Then I tried to go for help, but it was no good, you see, I couldn’t walk on that leg, no I couldn’t, but I tried, and I guess that’s what caused my problems, walking on that leg, so I’ve limped ever since, I have. That was in the Seventies, round about then, it doesn’t bother me at all,’ he said, but what he said was all nonsense.
I was sitting down now, but he stayed on his feet and wouldn’t sit, and it irritated me, who was in the worse shape, not me, no way, he looked as if he could snap in two at any moment, and then suddenly he smiled, he was a slyboots, he was making up stories, that’s what he did, and I wasn’t expected to believe a word of it, that was the whole point. We both knew why he limped and we had forgotten nothing, repressed nothing, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it, no, that was the trick, instead we would just look at each other with maybe a quick smile on our lips and share that knowledge, that memory, as though it was something that was ours together, his and mine, something intimate and violent, a secret, burning bond that held us together, a bond of blood.
Then I stood up. No peace, I thought, nothing that binds us together. I refuse.
TOMMY ⋅ SEPTEMBER 2006
IT WAS NEARLY three in the afternoon. Twice I had driven fifty kilometres north, and fifty kilometres south, also twice, up and down through Upper and Lower Romerike, of all places, a district I never went to any more, I hadn’t been there for many years. Now I was racing along the motorway at a hundred, and then some, on the way to Oslo in my charcoal grey Mercedes, and I thought, how much can a normal weekday in mid-September contain, is time like an empty sack you can stuff any number of things into, does it never go just from here to there, but instead in circles, round and round, so that every single time the wheel has turned, you are back where you started.
But that’s not the way it was. I used to be young. I wasn’t young any more. I would never be young again.
And so for the second time that day I was close to Lillestrøm, which I had left just a couple of hours ago, but this time I had no mission to fulfil there. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go into Oslo city centre where I had my office ten floors up where I worked every single day with money that barely existed, that was
liquid and flowing this way and that way at random, or so it seemed to me, and was transparent as water can be transparent, and at other times it was murky as water can be murky, yes, that most of all, and it was hard to see exactly what it was you were doing. And it came to me that I was never going back there. That was a surprising thought. I’ll be damned, I thought. No one could have imagined I would end up in a place like this. Just the idea that I would be sitting by a telephone and a computer shuffling invisible money about and earning a meaningless large sum of money in the process was embarrassing, or confusing when I thought myself back to where I started and all the way up the narrow, slippery rope from childhood to where I was now, at least it had made Jonsen confused. When I sold the mill it left him speechless and sad, but I was convinced I had to, for this I learned in the Eighties, that if you own something of value you will lose money if you don’t sell it. And I didn’t just sell the Kallum Saw Mill, I sold it to our competitor in Valmo, who immediately closed it down so he could rule over our district. I shouldn’t have done that, it changed me, but it was Jonsen himself who told me I had a head for figures. When I was thirty-five he made the mill over to me, I’ve got other things to do, he said, you’ll manage fine, you know how to do everything by now, and you can move it on, he said, much further than I ever could, just use the skills you have, he said, and move it on, but I don’t think he meant to the office block in the centre of Oslo.
He must have thought about it often, about what I did, and surely through the days in hospital before he died, but he never mentioned it when I came to see him. I wish he had.
I left the motorway, the E6, by the Skedsmo crossroads for the second time that day and followed the loop in a large circle around the Shell station, and on over the bridge to the opposite side and then down the hills to Kjeller past the aerodrome and into Lillestrøm. I parked in the centre, by the building where the Wine Monopoly used to be. Jim and I had been looking forward to standing in the queue at that very branch as soon as we were old enough. There was no Wine Monopoly in Mørk, just the idea was absurd, so this was the nearest, but of course, it never happened.
There was a restaurant in the place now. It surprised me a little, I don’t know why. Something had to be there. Anyway, it was open, and I wondered if they served lunch. I’d just had a small something to eat before I met Jim on the bridge early this morning, and after that I had driven into the city centre in my fine car. That was a lifetime ago, and now I was very hungry.
They did serve lunch. But it was a strange restaurant. It was gloomy inside: dark woodwork and sombre corners, at the far end of the room there was a skeleton hanging from the ceiling behind iron bars, and on the walls there were oddly crooked shelves with books intended to look mouldy. When I slunk into the toilet there were posters of horror films above the urinal, and then I realised this was the thing here, a concept someone had had, to create a fun, spooky atmosphere. It wasn’t much fun, I thought, and gloom was not what I needed right now, not even fun gloom, so I went out again and across the street to the new shopping centre and in through the swing doors to look for a place where I could eat. There was a cake shop on the ground floor, but what did I want with cakes. I was finished with cakes. I felt a prickle of irritation all over my body. I was hungry, I even felt like a dram, and if I’d got my hands on one, my body would have lost its tension and quietly settled and there would be peace. If someone speaks to me now, I thought, anything might happen.
I went through the new shopping centre and out again on the other side and into the old centre and took the escalator up to Level 2 and walked along the gallery past a few boutiques, there was one called Match, it looked pretentious, but not one piece of clothing inside would ever cling to my body in a natural way. I had put on weight, and besides, the shop was too young. Everything they had in these boutiques, all the clothes, were for young people now and for older people who didn’t want to be older, they wanted to be slim, you could see it in the ads, in magazines, on posters, they wanted to ride motorbikes and play squash and do the Birkebeiner race every summer and the same race in winter, on skis, and talk about it the following Monday in the canteen and go through every single kilometre in detail and laugh at each other’s trials and triumphs and compare times and equipment, they bought bright-looking sports gear and headed for the hills. But I wasn’t one of them.
At the end, in a corner, there was a café which was open to the gallery, you could just walk straight in from wherever you wanted. It looked perfect, no fancy concept. I walked in and wrapped my coat over the back of a chair, walked up to the counter and ordered a fairly substantial lunch. Or early dinner. The woman behind the counter was friendly, and she asked me how I was. I had never seen her before, why would I tell her anything. I said:
‘Fine, thanks. I’m just fine.’ And I thought, Oh Christ, I’m so hungry, get a move on.
‘That’s good to hear,’ she said. ‘There was someone just sitting at your table, he wasn’t so happy. He often comes here. He hardly ever smiles. And he’s always alone. I try to cheer him up a bit, but it doesn’t seem to help. It’s sad to see.’
‘Yes, I guess it is,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know that man. This is the first time I’ve been here.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘I’ve never seen you before. I would have remembered you, I’m sure of that,’ she said, and then, out of the blue, I said:
‘It’s not true what I said. I’m not fine, I’m not just fine.’ She stood still for a second, and then she said:
‘Oh, I’m sad to hear that.’
‘Yes, it’s sad,’ I said. ‘I wish everything was just fine, but it isn’t.’
‘What is it that’s so sad,’ she said.
‘That’s very difficult to explain.’
‘You can try,’ she said.
I looked around me. There was no one else at the counter. I looked at her. She was attractive, she was younger than me, ten years younger, or more. I could see both her hands, she wasn’t wearing a ring. But I couldn’t tell her about Jim and his blue woolly cap that had moved me so, it was especially the cap, and his worn, old reefer jacket in the dim light this morning on the bridge by Ulvøya, or about my father in the drunk tank, the colour of the walls, his sad trousers without a belt and his foot in the striped sock, like the foot of a child, no, I couldn’t stand here by the counter and tell her about that, no matter how attractive she was, hell no, I couldn’t. Besides, I was so hungry I was shuffling my feet like a little boy in need of the toilet.
‘I guess I’d better think it through first,’ I said. ‘Right now I’m famished.’
‘You go and sit down,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get the food ready.’
I paid what it cost and walked over and sat down at my table. I didn’t have a newspaper, so all I could do was stare into the air, but before I knew it she had appeared from behind the counter with a tray of food. She didn’t have to do that. She probably wasn’t supposed to, either. It was a self-service place. But it smelt good. And she smelt good as she leaned forward and put the tray in front of me on the table and lifted my plate from the tray and lifted the bread and cutlery from the tray and tucked the tray under her arm. I could see the skin on her neck close-up, and her skin moved me in such an odd way, and further down behind her blouse I could see her skin too, and it was as though I knew it from before and had touched it before, and it filled me with homesickness. She smiled. Her face was already a familiar face. She was pretty. I smiled back. She probably smiled like that at all the customers in this café, at least the male customers, I thought, and she probably smiled like that to the man who had just left and had been sitting at this very table, which was my table now, right before I came to the café in my purple coat and was hungry.
‘Bon appétit,’ she said.
‘Thank you. It’ll do me good,’ I answered, and she said:
‘I hope so,’ and started walking back to the counter. I watched her leave.
‘Excuse me,’ I said.
She stopped and turned.
‘Would it be very impolite,’ I said, ‘if I asked you what your name is.’
She hadn’t been smiling when she crossed the floor with her back to me. There could have been several reasons for that, not only that she had finished with me and was resting her lips for the next male customer.
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it would be impolite. Berit,’ she said. ‘My name is Berit.’
‘Berit,’ I said. ‘Thank you. That’s good. I’m glad you told me. It was kind of you.’
It wasn’t easy to explain, but I am sure it was her skin, her neck, that made me ask. I would have liked to put my hand on it so much, to touch it, again, you could almost say.
‘Kind of me. Maybe,’ she said, and still she didn’t smile, she was looking quite serious now, as though there was something seriously wrong. With her name perhaps. Or something else. How could I know. But she was pretty. I liked looking at her.
‘I hope there’s nothing wrong,’ I said.
‘I guess not,’ she said.
I nodded. Something was definitely wrong, and somehow we were in the same boat now, that was it, that’s where we were heading, and I nodded again, as warmly as possible, but not so warmly I would have to add something to bring us even closer, we were close enough already. It was my own fault. I could have kept my mouth shut. I’ll let it stop there, I thought. There is no other way out of this than politely letting it die of its own accord, what had emerged between us, from lack of oxygen, or will, or maybe even courage, yes, maybe even that, and so I said nothing. I dropped my head slowly to the table and the plate of food I still hadn’t touched. She turned away just as slowly, and in a short glimpse I could see she looked older now. She looked older when she didn’t smile. But she was still attractive.
I ate without once looking up. I should have had a newspaper in front of me, I thought, Aftenposten, preferably, or Dagens Næringsliv, that would have looked better, it wasn’t natural to sit so hunched over the table like this for such a long time. But what else could I do, I thought, and then I thought, where is Jim right now. I didn’t know where he lived, how could I. He was on the bridge this morning, but it was not likely he lived anywhere nearby. No one fishing on the bridge lived nearby, everyone in Ulvøya knew that, you could see them in the half-dark of the night, or the early morning, and otherwise they were wiped off the face of the earth, and who knew who they were. Not me. So Jim could be living anywhere, in Oslo, or further out, Enebakk, Nesodden or Drøbak. No, not Drøbak. But anything was possible. He moved from Mørk when we were eighteen. We had known each other for almost all those years, he was a year old when his mother came to Mørk with her rolling ‘r’s and Jim wrapped in her arms and a big bag and very little else, it’s what I’d heard. Nevertheless, it was a long time ago. A whole life came to an end that day at the Central Hospital, that was how it felt then, and it still felt that way, even after thirty years. And all of a sudden it was impossible to comprehend. How could I have lived without him for so long. How could I have. And with my face turned to the table, I started to cry, and I thought, how could I have lived without Jim. I tried to cry quietly into the plate, which was almost empty now, just a couple of rashers of bacon left, but it wasn’t easy. I squeezed my eyes to hold back the tears, I squeezed my mouth to hold back my breath, but then my shoulders started to shake, and I could not stop them. In one of my pockets I had a handkerchief. I searched my trouser pockets, but it wasn’t there, and then my jacket pockets, and then the coat hanging over the back of the chair. It was all a bit awkward and clumsy, for I couldn’t raise my head or turn, but instead had to twist my right hand hard behind my back, and finally I found the handkerchief at the bottom of the inside pocket on the left, and what on earth was it doing there, but I fished it out and wiped my face thoroughly and blew my nose so it would seem as if I had a cold, which in fact I did, I’d had one for several days, that was why I had a handkerchief in the first place, I didn’t normally carry one. This time I put it in my trouser pocket, and then I raised my head, and there she was, giving me her full attention from behind the counter between the coffee machine and the cash till. There was no one between us, no one at the till or the tables around me, and there was something about the way she was standing, with her one hand on the counter, and then the other placed itself next to the first, and neither hand had a finger with a ring on it. She wasn’t smiling. It was my fault. I could have kept my mouth shut. It was almost unbearable. I looked down at the table again and wiped my nose with the back of my hand, the way I did when I was a child, and stood up and took the purple coat from the chair. It was a heavy coat. I glanced over at her and nodded briefly, letting my gaze drop, and thought, God, am I glad you have to pay upfront. And then I left the café with the coat over my arm.
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