The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

by Nicolai Houm

  Lars Christian was home now. She could hear his and Eva’s voices from downstairs and a childish sensation came back: having to put up with adults talking about you, hearing them through walls and floor, using indistinguishable words; the child praying for forgiveness but mixing the words of the prayer with a mantra of impotent hatred. I hope they die. I hope they die.

  Behind her closed eyes, she had a vision of a scorched landscape, grey and smoking as if after a firestorm. Over there, the ruins of the university where she had worked; and not far away, the remains of their house in Madison – nothing much left except the chimney, a charred writing desk and – as if it had been TV reportage – a child’s soft toy lying in the ashes; then, the sooty foundations of her parents’ apartment by Lake Michigan – Robert and Dorothy using their hands to search the ashes. This was the America she had left behind. What had been ahead for her, on the other side of the ocean, was not necessarily a much greener place and, on the whole, faceless, but at least it did not burn.

  A cautious knock on the door. She hoped it would be Camilla but it was Lars Christian’s narrow face that appeared round the edge of the door.

  ‘May I come in, Jane?’

  It was a toothless question. He was obviously trying hard to be conciliatory. She had been told of the importance of ‘cosiness’ in this country.

  She felt like saying: it’s your home.

  He made for the chair next to the bed and she had to move a small pile of underwear into the suitcase on the floor.

  Lars Christian was smiling as his tired eyes fixed on her.

  ‘She was upset that you, both of you rather, became a little hostile.’

  Jane, for the first time, uttered a Norwegian-style uhum.

  ‘She felt it really wasn’t for you to be involved in… this. Your relationship with us still isn’t… that close, even though it’s very exciting from the point of view of our family history.’

  Jane sat on the edge of the bed and made herself small. She was sorry for Lars Christian, whose role as messenger or negotiator seemed to be robbing him of more vestiges of masculinity. What was left disappeared swiftly with the words he had been charged to pass on. Jane noted that he didn’t speak of Eva but of she.

  ‘She has gone to bed now but in the morning…’

  ‘First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll apologize, Lars Christian. As soon as I see her.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  She looked up at him with a question on the tip of her tongue but he got in first.

  ‘I never felt this rhythm gymnastics thing was right for Camilla.’ He spread his arms. ‘But for as long as she enjoys it…’

  For a moment, it occurred to her that she might be charmed by Lars Christian. In another life. Say, if he had been Camilla’s sole carer. A compelling if fleeting thought came and went: bend forward, put your hand on his thigh, high up, do it now.

  Lars Christian stood, ready to leave her room.

  ‘You…’ she said.

  He stopped with his hand on the door handle.

  ‘Lars Christian, if I need to consult a doctor here, how do I go about it?’

  ‘I hope you’re not unwell?’

  ‘No, no. Or, to be precise…’

  The information on the back of the box was mostly for epileptics, not people with conditions like hers.

  ‘I’m an epileptic. It’s not bad and usually well controlled. But I’ve run out of medicine.’

  ‘I see.’ Lars Christian slowly pushed the door handle down, then let it click back up again. ‘I promise to call our doctor tomorrow morning. He will surely write out a prescription straight away. As long as you know exactly what you need.’

  ‘Valium. Ten milligram tablets.’

  Lars Christian repeated this.

  ‘I’ll get in touch with him as soon as I get into work tomorrow morning.’

  During the night, the dream came back for the first time for weeks. As always, she dreamt that she had gone to Chicago for the Newberry seminar on American literary history and was in a hotel room when there was a knock on the door. With only small modifications, the dream dealt in real events as they had unfolded that morning in Chicago. It was more like a retelling of the past, without the nightmare’s delirious lack of any logic or predictability, where rooms can change into other places. She had been sitting in an armchair with its back to the window. One curtain had been pulled back and the crisp light of dawn fell on a hotel writing pad in her lap. She had made a few last notes on the presentation she was to give later that morning on John Updike’s literary legacy.

  In the dream, as in reality, she assumed that a cleaner was waiting outside the door and it made her look for anything embarrassing left lying around. She had checked in late and had hardly had time to do more than take a few steps across the carpet. That morning, she had already tidied the bed a little and didn’t need more towels.

  As she walked the short distance to the door to tell whoever was outside that she was fine and busy with something important, she managed – in the dream, at least – to have a vision of her life with Greg and Julie, a distillation complete with an extremely concentrated run-through of moments of shame and happiness but also rich in detail, down to things like Greg’s tone of voice when he told her that he wanted to take her surname (a land of ashes is better than Noland at all) and Julie’s trembling lower lip when she had fallen from the climbing frame in Olin Park and, as they found out later, broken her arm.

  There was another knock on the door, but by then she knew what to expect and didn’t want to take the last few steps across the floor. It was at this point that the most marked discrepancies occurred: in the dream, the voice of the overweight woman police officer who had done the knocking did not come from outside the door; she was suddenly sitting at the end of Jane’s bed in full uniform, and at her side stood a younger male colleague and the hotel manager who had escorted them. The policewoman cupped her hands to form a bowl that hid something from view. Her eyes attracted Jane, who slowly came closer, even though she realized that the hidden thing was something she didn’t want to see.

  ‘Jane Ashland? We must talk to you,’ the hotel person said in an oddly tuneful voice, like a clarinet’s.

  The policewoman reached out her arms towards Jane, solemnly parting her hands as if to offer up a sacrifice or scatter petals. Reluctantly, Jane leant forward and saw, in the woman’s palms, a small dead animal, its fur torn and bloody.

  A sound out of hell woke her. She knew she must take something. Golden light filtered in through the gap beneath the blind. The colour made her think of organs stored in formaldehyde. She turned to lie on her front, raised the blind a little and saw the Poles busying themselves with an angle grinder just below her window. In a cloud of concrete dust, Andrej or Andrzej watched as Eva cut a flagstone in half.

  In between the heart-wrenching howls, the house was quiet. Jane walked downstairs barefoot, still in her nightdress, holding her wallet in her hand. She crossed the terrace and then the lawn where the frost was shrinking back into the shadows under the thuja trees. The sun’s rays bounced off the roof of the caravan and burned her corneas. She could have counted the blades of grass.

  Eva looked up and saw Jane just as she was about to start cutting a new concrete slab. Jane covered her ears with the wallet and her free hand as she stepped inside the dust cloud, which smelt strongly of gunpowder. How easy it was to lose one’s sense of reality when there was nothing else left to lose. When the grinding disc had stopped spinning, she made her face convey ‘you know how one can feel sometimes’ and asked if she could buy one of their bottles of vodka.

  The young man grinned, as if in sympathy.

  ‘No problem,’ Eva mumbled.

  Their reaction didn’t surprise her. She had mentally granted them both a capacity for observation, a grasp of reality that the Askeland-Nilsens lacked. She had a vision of their lives, impoverished and bleak, among storm-lashed grey tower blocks in a former Soviet state – existenc
es in which pretence had no place.

  She mixed the vodka with some of the blackcurrant cordial she had found in the kitchen. The first glass went down quickly, the second she sipped as slowly as she could and remembered how Charles Bukowski had put it: ‘When you drank, the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.’ Though Bukowski had omitted to mention that after the third shot of alcohol, a sensation of suffocating could come back and, later still, of keeping barely a pace or two ahead of someone pursuing you down a dark alleyway.

  At one point, she found herself in Camilla’s room, sitting on the girl’s bed with a large, yellow soft toy from IKEA squashed against her chest. Then, she threw up in the bathroom on the second floor and had to use the end of her toothbrush to push lumps of vomit down the washbasin drain holes. She showered for a long time and settled down in a cheerful mood to wait for the Askeland-Nilsens to come home. As the afternoon wore on, she had persuaded herself that the quarrel between herself and Eva was simply typical of what happened in an extended family. People occasionally would have different points of view. A bagatelle, then, rather like the matter of the damaged soap dish in the shower cubicle. She had knocked it down and hidden it deep inside the trash can.

  By seven in the evening, no one had turned up. The Polish couple retreated into their trailer, leaving behind a numbing silence. She poured the last of the blackcurrant cordial into a mug with a measure of spirits and drank the lot leaning over the kitchen counter from where she could see the road through a low, narrow window.

  Lars Christian’s Volvo drove up at around eight o’clock. He parked near the wire fence outside the site as the last metres to the garage were still not flagged. Camilla climbed out slowly. She was wearing the white tracksuit and her hair was up. Jane thought her face had the same pained expression as after the training the other night, and ran out into the hall. As soon as she had stepped inside, Jane pulled Camilla close and pressed her lips against the girl’s hair. Lars Christian’s presence in the same space registered as a distracted gaze, minor movements, jackets being hung up. Camilla giggled a little and said something in Norwegian before slipping out of Jane’s embrace and disappearing into the bathroom.

  Lars Christian suddenly stopped in front her. He stood quite still. She focused on a point above his eyebrows.

  ‘How has your day been?’ she asked. What she actually wanted to know was if he had got hold of her medication. At the deep inlets in his hairline, his skin was tight and smooth. She wanted to put her finger up where his hair had once grown and follow the curve until it reached the first small, childishly downy hairs.

  ‘I… well, I don’t know. All right?’ Lars Christian tried to catch her eye.

  ‘This arrived today,’ he said. He was holding a square cardboard box in his hand. ‘Your book!’

  ‘That was quick.’

  ‘Express delivery apparently takes no more than two to four days.’

  ‘All the way from the States?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She felt uncomfortable at the sight of the Amazon box, like a victim of blackmail confronting a box crammed with evidence of sins of the past.

  ‘It’s just a book,’ she said.

  Lars Christian looked confused, turned towards the shoe rack and finally let her pass.

  She went back to the kitchen. Her empty mug had vanished from the draining board. She was positive that she had left it there after rinsing it. She heard Camilla and Lars Christian’s voices from another room. The only word she understood was shampoo.

  ‘Have you noticed that we’re out of hot water?’ Lars Christian asked. He had suddenly come in and stood behind her with the broken soap dish in his hand.

  A small chunk of time had worked loose and dropped off without her noticing. The door to the dishwasher was open and the top rack pulled out.

  ‘No, I haven’t. Maybe they showered for too long?’ She gestured towards the caravan in the garden.

  Lars Christian looked at her until she turned back to the dishwasher.

  ‘Eva has collected your medicine from the pharmacy. She’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Thank you!’ Her intense relief made her take a small, silly dance step.

  She closed the dishwasher lid and stood still, gripping the edge of the counter.

  ‘I think I had better rest a little before she comes back,’ she said, addressing Lars Christian’s back. ‘I feel a little off balance because I haven’t taken my medicine.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Not that I get epileptic fits or anything,’ she said cheerfully, imitating a few twitchy spasms as a child might, to mock the disabled.

  Just as she crossed the threshold of the guest room and before she fell onto her bed, her writer’s genes forced her for a brief moment to look at the whole scene from another angle: how bizarre it must be to have an intoxicated foreign woman, a complete stranger, staying in one’s guest room.

  She woke up because someone was looking at her. It was Camilla. She knocked gently on the open door and asked, ‘Why is Oskar here?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Camilla pointed towards something just by Jane’s head. A perception as thin and sharp as the edge of a knife made her turn slowly round. Immediately in front of her eyes, the yellow toy from Camilla’s room was lying on her pillow.

  Camilla cautiously approached the bed, as if Jane were an animal likely to bolt any second.

  ‘Mummy asked me to give you these.’

  She placed an orange and white box of tablets on the edge of the bed. One word on it jeered at her in bold type: rektal. For rectal use only. Tight-lipped, she slumped back onto the pillow. Camilla asked if something was wrong.

  ‘No, honey. Nothing at all.’

  She closed her eyes, and then opened them again. Camilla was still standing there.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘In your book. There was something printed inside. On one of the first pages.’

  A long pause, and then it came.

  ‘Who are Greg and Julie?’

  *

  Afterwards, parts of what had happened next had been wiped from her memory, as if by an act of charity. Regrettably, she could still recall that, around ten o’clock that evening, she was lying on her side trying to insert a Valium suppository when Martin, the son of the house, burst into the guest room to say hello to her.

  She also remembered that Eva had asked if she was on something and that her own answer had consisted largely of the word ‘insinuate’, repeated insistently in a loud voice. And that she had been clinging to Lars Christian when Eva escorted her, carefully but with determination, to the front door. And that Camilla didn’t cry, which Jane perhaps would have wished her to. She sat in the hire car outside the Askeland-Nilsen family home until dawn broke, since the one thing in the world she would never do was drive under the influence.

  ON THE FIRST MORNING, they crossed the crystalline waters of a river and walked uphill through a forest about to lose its last glowing, autumnal tints. The slope was so steep that she was looking straight at the backs of Ulf’s knees.

  ‘Freak-show animals. That’s all they’re seen as. Tourist attractions. Because they’re not native. Foreign introduction. If I had been researching wild reindeer, I’d have had an easier time of it. My own office. And so forth.’

  Then he launched into a lecture on public funding of research and how it was administered, most of which Jane couldn’t follow. But she did take on board that the train killed around ten musk oxen every year because the railway lines had been cut straight through their territory.

  After a while, Ulf had drawn a bit ahead of her. The distance between them grew until he was out of sight. He waited for her farther up the ridge but as soon as she caught up, he set off again. The process, which was repeated many times, meant that he got some rest but she didn’t.

  ‘You’ll tell me if I’m walking too fast, won’t you?�
�� Ulf said. And walked off and left her behind again.

  After a few hours of this, they finally reached the plateau. The forest had ended at a line as sharp as if it had been the edge of a tilled field. They stood there for a while. The expanse around them was absolutely still. So much solid mass: you would expect it to produce some kind of sound. A vast number of stones of all sizes lay immobile in the feeble sunlight. The path continued across other ridges until details were lost in the distance. The eye could just make out, even farther away, contrasts of black and white on a faultless peak.

  ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’

  It was. To say the least.

  ‘I feel so incredibly alive up here, at one with nature,’ Ulf went on.

  Jane searched for traces of irony in his face but his eyes didn’t leave the snowy mountain top. He kept looking at it as he moved close to her and put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Up here is a perfect place for recharging one’s batteries.’

  She giggled and felt at the same time a pang of loneliness that reached into the core of her body. It made her think about the first boy she’d slept with, a guy called Ray Dechamps, whom she had been told was a catch, partly because his older brother drove a Pontiac with flame-effect paintwork on the hood.

  Ulf let his hand stay on her shoulder. There was a stack of flattish stones just next to them.

  ‘Why have the stones been put on top of each other?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a cairn,’ Ulf told her.

  ‘What’s a cairn?’

  ‘A marker to show where the path is.’

  ‘But the ones over there are quite far from the path.’ She pointed.

  ‘True.’

  ‘So why are they there?’

  ‘People build them.’

  ‘Why do?…’

  Ulf made a tut-tut noise and started walking.

  For a few seconds, Jane stood quite still with her eyes closed. Then she followed him. Low pale green shrubs that reminded her of wormwood or sage brushed against her trouser legs and covered previously made trails.