by Nicolai Houm
How hollow it sounded. But whatever he became made not the slightest difference. She cared for only one thing: would they still be together?
Even so, she had to carry on.
‘It’s not the same as becoming a plumber or a dentist. It’s not about a straight choice. It’s about taking a step at a time.’
He took his cap off and slapped it against his thigh as if he had been out on a dusty country road.
‘You must work out if writing is for you. If you enjoy it. Not if you want to be a writer.’
‘Sure. So, I’ve decided I won’t write.’
Cautiously, she walked up to him, stopped at arm’s length and, standing on tiptoe, pulled her fingers through his hair. It was sticky where the cap had been.
‘I’m sweating. It’s a killer heat out there.’
‘But why are you thinking like this?’
‘Your voice tells me you know why,’ he replied, but didn’t sound as if he blamed her.
She was about to start crying and had to look away. ‘Because of what I said?’
‘Because you were right in what you said. My course teachers have told me roughly the same. So have some people in the class. But you’re the only one among them who can’t possibly have an ulterior motive.’
‘Greg, come here.’ She led him to the bed and they sat down together.
‘Whatever happens, we will need one decent income,’ he went on. ‘One of us should go for a steady job. Stands to reason who it should be.’
His hands were still on the bedspread. He was looking into the future.
‘But, I’d like to be… well, connected to literature. I mean, professionally, somehow. Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Like, say, a librarian?’
‘Maybe.’
He took her hand.
‘Jane, you mustn’t cry.’
‘I’m not crying. I love you.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you sure it isn’t worth trying to write a little more?’ She turned away from him to dry her tears. He pulled out a cigarette from his breast pocket with his free hand and left it dangling between his lips. She reached out for matches and lit it for him.
‘There are two kinds of people in this world…’ Greg began.
‘Those who say there’re two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t?’ Jane suggested.
‘Listen.’ He inhaled, then exhaled and the smoke swirled lazily across the floor. ‘There are those who deliver and those who receive. I mean it. Consider yourself. You read a third of what I read. You hardly ever talk about books. You’re critical of practically all forms of culture, TV programmes, films, whatever. Even baseball games. I think you don’t experience such things the same way I do. You don’t get taken in. You sit there, thinking of how differently you’d have gone about it. If you had cared to try in the first place, that is. Constant analysis. For example, think about our trip.’
‘The thought of losing you had left me nearly comatose.’
‘I know, but before that. Not finding Updike’s house wouldn’t have bothered you at all. I know you think that any damn thing can be turned into narrative. So, you had no need to see that house, or any other. For inspiration, or anything like that. I’m sure you had gathered enough material for three short stories before we crossed the Pennsylvanian border.’
So, he had understood how the creative part of her mind worked.
‘But, I… I’m not like you,’ he said. ‘I’m almost the opposite. And I’m fine with that for as long as I can see that you succeed.’
So dearly did he love her.
Jane dedicated her first book to Greg. The launch date was 16th March 2000. It was impossible to forget the date. Three years later, on that same day, their daughter Julie was born.
SHE WALKED UP the brick steps to the sports hall with the seizure lingering in her body like a muscular hum. She smiled at the woman who came down the steps with a couple of hula hoops in her hand and used her coat sleeve to wipe off a dribble of spit. It had begun after the usual signs: the smell of sun-warmed gravel, and hair that should have been washed, the sight of autumn leaves in a sandbox.
Once inside, she followed the sounds of the authoritative voices of coaches shouting above the beat of Eurodisco. She opened a door to a huge gym with a hangar-like, domed roof that made her head swim once more. Stepping over boots, water bottles and Hello Kitty bags, she went to sit on a low wooden bench along a wall covered with wooden bars. Camilla was on the exercise mat, dancing and doing cartwheels with a candy-coloured ball. Her face was red, as if she had been crying. Then the beat of the music changed and, at the same time, there was a piercingly nasal call from a female coach. Camilla went up on her toes holding the ball in her hands before sinking to her knees and arching the upper part for her body backwards in a move with echoes of adult sensuality. She stayed in position, her bottom against her heels, rolling the ball across her chest between the palms of her hands.
Jane nodded to the mothers sitting next to her on the bench. Every one of them wore tall rubber boots laced at the top. Their faces had obviously been attended to with much care. She was glad to have escaped twitching with cramps on the floor in front of this lot, in front of anyone. That hadn’t happened since the day she dropped in to deliver her car to Tom. Her place of choice was a toilet, preferably one for the disabled – she could deal with the bouts of shivering on her own by seeing the joins between the tiles as vanishing lines in a perspective. Afterwards she would feel stiff and sore, as if she had been walking for too long in ill-fitting shoes. The intense sense of awareness that each one of us stands alone on this Earth usually persisted for a couple of hours.
There were at least forty girls on the floor, all of them beautiful. Their concentration made them turn all their attention inwards, into an inner hall of mirrors, shiny and glittering, with a flawless floor. And then she made a discovery: some of these girls danced and turned with the bloodless precision of small steel devices covered in stretch Lycra. It made her shiver again, like an aftershock of the shaking that had sent her into the toilet.
Three of the coaches were from Eastern Europe. Jane wasn’t sure that she could hear the difference between native Norwegian and, say, Polish Norwegian, but she observed their Slavic features and their hard make-up, which fleetingly made her think: ‘prostitutes’. The older lady who was supervising Camilla looked like a native, though. She had parked herself at the edge of the mat, next to the chair with the CD player, and was shouting. Every time Camilla let the ball slip and stood still, hesitating while the music continued, her coach emitted a loud snorting noise from deep inside her sinuses. The girl smiled apologetically and carried on. Jane watched as the young body grew steadily more self-conscious, its movements more forced. She sensed rather than saw a faint shoulder tremor. At one point, the coach ran up to the girl and slapped her thigh. Jane just stopped herself from crying out.
When the ball rolled away after yet another uncoordinated pirouette, Camilla buried her face in her hands.
Jane got up. She was only too aware of how out of place she would look out there on the exercise mats: shapely, adult, wearing a coat, as she stepped into the flow of raucous music. The coach had already reached Camilla, taken hold of her upper arm with a two-fingered pincer grip, as if touching an insect, and pulled her up. Camilla turned her face away. Unheeding, the other girls carried on with their moves. The mothers on the bench glanced briefly at the scene, then located their own daughters in the crowd and smiled.
As Jane started out towards the middle of the floor, the coach came closer to Camilla, picked up the ball and squeezed it under her arm. Jane heard her whisper something at the same time as she moved her right hand from the girl’s arm to her waist and pinched a small fold of skin and leotard between thumb and index finger while shaking her head. Jane was pretty sure she had seen all she needed. Camilla twisted herself free and ran past Jane.
‘Camilla, wait!’
Jane had a good ide
a of what the coach had said to Camilla, something about being overweight, which was absurd not only because the girl was so thin, but was quite out of order in any case. As she got closer to the coach, it became obvious that she kept nodding uncontrollably: tiny, twitchy head movements that made her grey hair, cut level with her pearl earrings, swing in time. Jane only stopped to tear the ball from her grip, using such force that the older woman was almost pulled off balance.
Shakily, with everyone staring at her, Jane went back to the bench, took Camilla’s bag and hurried away and down the stairs.
Camilla was in a toilet on the first floor, bending over a wash basin with the hot water tap running. The room was dark apart from an illuminated Emergency Exit sign which bathed her face in a dull, greenish glow. When Camilla saw Jane, she pulled a paper towel from the dispenser and dried her face. Jane put her arm round the girl. Seen through the condensation on the mirror, they could have been mother and daughter.
‘She’s always like that,’ Camilla said. Somehow, it was meant as an excuse.
As she stroked Camilla’s back, Jane felt the warmth of the girl’s body through the material of her leotard.
‘I have to go back up,’ Camilla said.
‘No, you don’t. Forget about it.’
Jane’s hand slid upwards to a bony shoulder. She felt as if she were standing at the top of a dizzyingly tall staircase, holding on to the ball at the end of the handrail. She closed her eyes for a few seconds.
‘You mustn’t listen to that woman. You’re very good.’
Camilla groaned as she threw the balled-up paper towel into the wire basket. She was ashamed by her poor performance and full of contempt for herself, just as the trainer had intended. The girl could not accept a compliment. Jane took a step back.
‘You are, you know.’ She breathed in, and the air seemed to have to force its way past various obstacles.
‘Oh, yeah?’ Camilla said and rolled her eyes.
A damp strand of hair dangled in front of her face. Jane pushed it back behind Camilla’s ear and kept her hand there for just long enough to work out a more pedagogic way of approach.
‘What is the goal you are all working towards?’
‘To become champions of Europe.’
Her pronunciation of English was adorable and her minor syntactical errors only emphasized how much of a child there still is inside a fourteen-year-old.
‘What is your chance of that?’
‘If I work hard for two more years and the Bulgarian girls don’t…’
Camilla avoided Jane’s eyes in the mirror.
‘I see. The idea is, you’ll starve yourself for a couple more years and be bullied five times a week so that, maybe, you’ll be a European champion of a uniquely weird sport?’
‘I’m not starving myself.’
‘So you say. But her pinching you, what was that for?’ She almost ended the sentence with ‘little Miss’, a rhetorical habit from the days when she often discussed matters with a little Miss.
‘I don’t think she meant to pinch me.’
‘Come on, I saw it. I’m sorry to have to say it but this outfit is an anorexia factory. There are little girls of nine up there who ought to be in hospital.’
Camilla smiled, a little superciliously.
‘I really have to go back.’
Jane shook her head. She had already got the car keys out of her coat pocket and rattled them to show she was serious.
On the way home, Jane filled the silence with a discourse on what mattered in life and what one should not put up with, as a person and as a woman. To leave that place had been a grown-up, rational decision. Jane thought that there had been no other choice and would explain the situation to Eva. She would not escort the distraught girl back up that staircase; it was simply not an option. Jane was convinced that Eva had been pushing her daughter but could probably be forgiven for not having seen the light earlier, even though she had surely been aware of how the gym club operated. Camilla must have been training since she was about five years old, together with other girls whose parents also sanctioned with their silence the whole anti-cultural set-up. They had been sliding slowly into acceptance of an insane situation, as an outsider could see at a glance. Time for the blushing admission one has to make at least once in a lifetime: Yes, I see… now you put it like that, well…
Eva met them at the door. Camilla hurried away upstairs and her mother followed her.
‘It became a bit tense,’ Jane said.
Eva stopped halfway up the stairs. She had a skewed view of Jane through the sheet glass panels. Small muscles were visibly twitching at her jaw.
‘Yes, thanks, I know already. I’ve been informed.’
‘Informed?’
‘The head coach phoned.’
‘Doesn’t she have just the most annoying voice?’ Jane said.
But Eva was already taking the last steps of the stairs.
Jane went into the open-plan kitchen with her coat still on, poured herself a glass of water and drank in small sips while she supported herself with one hand on the counter. The room seemed unnecessarily brightly lit, like a kitchen exhibit in a trade fair. She thought about what to say next and, in her head, heard her own voice sound alternately regretful and self-justifying. Eva’s judgemental streak constantly threatened to surface. As if she lived with an incurable disappointment, as if the world owed her something better. Jane asked herself if this might be a characteristic trait of Norwegian women. A travel writer with a talent for gross simplifications might just have put it all down to the climate. Or all that oil money. Perhaps Norwegian women collectively suffered from a bad conscience because they were sober people who had suddenly become rich?
She had started to shake again.
Eventually, Eva came downstairs. There were red spots on her forehead but her eyes were impassive as she went to stand behind the solid dinner table. Just beneath Jane’s embarrassment and fear of losing control, she felt righteously exasperated on Camilla’s behalf. How could it be defensible to make these girls keep going back to the gym? She thought of their fragile, unknowing bodies, their small ears exposed by the tightly pulled-back hairdos. How alone they surely were, these girls, although watched by their seated mothers? Camilla should not return to that place ever again. Jane felt that she had better close her eyes, in case her mouth said things her brain would rather it hadn’t:
‘Eva, I’m serious. Presumably you know what’s going on in that place?’
The heat rash at Eva’s hairline must be infectious.
‘No. What is going on, Jane?’ Eva asked calmly.
‘What’s going on? What happens there?’
‘You tell me.’
‘What happens…’ Damn Eva’s cunning, her fixed stare made Jane repeat herself. ‘It is that… they remove the girls’ self-confidence and replace it with… rhythmic gymnastics.’
Eva nodded as if getting the point.
‘Honestly, they bully the girls.’
‘And you worked all this out in one brief visit?’
‘That’s right, I did.’
‘I see.’ Eva went to the fridge, opened the door and pretended to be very preoccupied.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Jane, right now I’m going to make supper.’
‘So, you intend to carry on exposing Camilla to the gym sessions?’ Jane had taken her coat off and realized that she was fussing about, trying to hang it up on the back of a chair.
‘Whatever I do, I won’t discuss it with you.’ There was a long pause before Eva finally added, lowering her voice, ‘To be absolutely frank, I’m not quite clear why you’re here at all.’
Jane’s hands went to her belly as if she had been knifed. Eva was still turned away from her, standing at the counter cutting up broccoli.
‘You bitch,’ Jane exclaimed.
She had lost control over what she said, just like her coat, still a bundle in her hands. And that first transgression of hers
brought on more.
‘I’ve noticed how you talk to Lars Christian sometimes, and to shop assistants and waiters as well. That prodding look of yours. “But, Lars Christian, I thought we had agreed that…”’ She imitated Eva’s sing-song tone of voice with its note of restrained aggression. To play-act was liberating. ‘Oh, yes. “I have got it all, husband and kids and I know just precisely how I want it. I go jogging and then go jogging some more. And keep everyone in order and fetch and carry and drink a glass of red wine of an evening. Never more than one, God forbid.”’
Eva had turned round now, her eyes shiny with disbelief. Jane asked herself if this was the time to put all her cards on the table. Hers was an unbeatable hand. She might choose to have a breakdown right here in the kitchen and melt into a sympathy-provoking mess. But she could not make herself do it.
Her body was quaking as she rushed into the hall, put on her trainers and pushed the door open with her shoulder while struggling with one sleeve of her coat. Polish Eva and her partner stood smoking outside under the recessed all-weather lamps lighting the porch. They stood where it was hard to pass them. Anyway, Jane had no idea where she wanted to go. She found a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in her coat pocket, and with darting movements, lit a cigarette and put it between her lips.
‘Brr, it’s getting cold.’ Jane made it sound as if her trembling voice was just mimicry.
Neither replied. She smiled with, as she well knew, a wild look in her eyes.
‘Isn’t it cold in that trailer of yours?’
‘No,’ Eva said.
Presumably, if one travelled farther into Europe, one would eventually find a place where people communicated exclusively in tiny hand gestures to exchange goods and services, or to mate.
Later, after Jane had sneaked back upstairs to the guest room, she discovered the trap she was caught in. She had been fooled by the blister pack, as usual, pressed out what she needed for weeks while the treacherous silver foil had kept its shape and tricked her into thinking that she had several intact rows left. She straightened up and, with her hand pressed against her neck, looked out over the dark garden. She had been thinking about alcohol roughly every five minutes since she had driven Camilla to the gym and this, in turn, had triggered her need to check the stocks in her Valium cache.