by Nicolai Houm
‘I give in!’ Jane cried.
‘Loser.’
Afterwards, they went to the Thai Pavilion and compared the greenish stains on their clothes. Julie eagerly went through a blow-by-blow account of the battle and Jane, who was looking at her daughter’s face, made the right noises to show that she was just as keen to relive the drama. Julie’s eyes were very wide, her nose was wrinkled, her lips moved ceaselessly. All this attracted Jane’s gaze, as did something else, both there and not there, that made her able to sense the shape of the young woman’s mind. The old saying that your child is only on loan annoyed her: Julie was her daughter and, just as irrevocably, she was Julie’s mother. No facile philosophizing could change that.
She thought she might write about the episode, turn it into a scene in a novel or perhaps a short story, but realized it wasn’t a good idea. These moments had no intrinsic structure, no problematic issue, no conflict. Only love.
While they sat there, the big lawnmower rolled past them on the cobbles below the pavilion. The man was relaxed in his seat, steering with one finger on the wheel. He got to where the path branched on either side of a statue of a lion and, just before he might have disappeared behind the trees, he pulled a lever by his seat and swung the mower onto a grassy verge that ran parallel with the path. Jane watched with a vague sense of satisfaction as the rotating cutters created a lighter strip in the grass. Suddenly, a squirrel leapt out of a bush and ran straight at the machine. Julie had her back turned and didn’t notice Jane’s gasp. The squirrel tried a few pointless escapes, jumping first to one side, then to the other, before it vanished under the blades. The man obviously hadn’t seen it. Jane held her breath while looking past Julie at the mower. When the squirrel emerged from underneath it, she thought at first that it had survived intact because it moved so quickly. It kept jumping up and down, as if the ground were red hot. Then she understood: the squirrel had been mutilated and the jumping was the effect of an instinctive flight response. A healthy leg kicked out and sent the body high up in the air where it somersaulted and fell back, landing on its side or its head or one of its damaged limbs. A hard-wired sequence; one could hear the processor spin.
The mower followed the curving path out of sight. The squirrel was still making its terrible leaps but had shifted sideways onto the cobbles and there was a noise each time it hit the ground. Jane faced Julie with a big, shaky grin but it was too late – Julie had already turned round to see what it was. In the short moment Julie needed to take in the strange sight, Jane had time to imagine a scenario: she had to hold the kicking, struggling squirrel in one hand while prodding it to get a grip and break its little neck as an act of mercy.
Initially, Julie shocked her by laughing.
‘Look! What is it doing?’ Julie pointed.
But then, if Jane hadn’t watched the whole sequence, she would probably have been just as baffled. Could they get away so easily? With luck, maybe the animal would bounce into the bushes, leaving her alone with a memory that would make her tell herself that ‘nature must take its course’, repeat it in the car on the way home and in bed before she fell asleep – but what nature? The kind of nature in which squirrels are carved up by lawnmowers?
No such luck.
‘Mom, it’s bleeding,’ Julie cried.
Jane ran after her, past a small, concreted-in pond set in the space in front of the pavilion. Clouds moved swiftly across its still surface. Somehow it was as if she had never left her desk, as if she were still inside an imagined world. The closer they got to the squirrel, the more strongly she experienced its suffering as it shot up in the air and fell back, again and again. And with it, the realization that it wasn’t even smart enough to put its pain into context. She knew Julie felt more or less the same. Jane had had to accept that empathy was probably not part of the human inheritance; she and Greg had been doling it out in regular doses, like teaspoons of medicine, throughout Julie’s childhood. But by now, the medication had done its work and Julie was ready to suffer with all and everyone.
‘Mom, do something!’
They stopped on the edge of the large, virtual circle surrounding the convulsing squirrel, Jane holding her arms protectively in front of her body while her hands attempted to mimic sensible things to do. They both turned away, repulsed, unable to watch, then forced themselves to look, screaming in unison.
And then it was all over. The squirrel lay still, its white belly up and its front paws folded.
Jane wanted the whole thing to be over and done with as soon as possible. She would have flicked the squirrel into the bushes with a stick, but suggesting it made Julie wail. Instead, Jane had to pick it up and carry it in her hands all the way through the park. She had thought it would be like picking up a kitten, but the wrecked little creature rested on her palms like an oozing bag of skin.
On the way home, the squirrel lay on the rubber mat between Julie’s feet. The girl was beside herself. Jane had to phone Mrs Gurzky and cancel the piano lesson.
They left the squirrel in the car to rummage in the attic for a coffin suitable for a small rodent.
‘I know we have a shoe box in here somewhere,’ Jane said, trying to bring some normality back into her voice.
But the search resulted in only one possibility, a flat gift box from Tie Rack. They would have to squash the corpse to fit it in, Jane said.
‘Perhaps it should lie in the ground without a coffin? Just like other dead animals?’
‘No-o!’ Julie sobbed.
Jane had to remind herself that she was grown up and mustn’t let go and collapse, kicking and screaming, on the floorboards. In the end, she persuaded Julie that a decorative plant pot with cotton wool on the bottom would be right.
Greg arrived while they were unlocking the tool shed to get the spade. When he pointed out that it wouldn’t be in the shed but was leaning against the wall near the patio door – as always – she snarled at him.
‘So why have a fucking shed, then?’
It was so typical of Greg to turn up on the scene once the hardest part was over. Now all they had to do was to conduct a small burial ceremony for a dead squirrel.
Later, when a hole had been dug under the copper beech in the back garden and all three of them were standing by the graveside, she felt that Greg was being infuriating on purpose.
‘You give the oration since you’re the writer.’
Greg knew very well how much it annoyed her when people assumed that writers would be thrilled to deliver a spontaneous speech and, anyway, were especially gifted in that line.
Julie held the plant pot tight and looked from Greg to Jane and then back again. Greg sighed a little.
‘All right,’ he said and then, of course, spoke beautifully about the squirrel’s brief life and its tiny squirrel heart, adding light touches of irony and sweet references to familiar ones like Snipp and Snapp, all done with such subtlety that Julie kept nodding agreement. So easy for him, who hadn’t seen the silly little beast flapping on its ruined limbs.
After supper, Greg pulled his jacket on and said he was going over to Tom’s. They were going to watch a film about Alaska.
‘But I’m leaving early tomorrow morning, remember?’
‘We’ll meet up in the morning before you leave.’
‘Before four-thirty?’
‘Then we’d better say goodbye now.’
He leant over her to kiss her and she turned her cheek to him.
The whole squirrel performance had left her irritated and anxious, feelings that stayed with her all evening as she prepared for her talk at the Newberry seminar, packed the suitcase and went through a bundle of school handouts that Julie had kindly remembered to pull out of her schoolbag at a quarter past nine. When Julie – three quarters of an hour later and still not in her pyjamas – followed her into the bathroom and stood behind her insisting that she needed help with varnishing her nails because tomorrow, in the social studies lesson, she was part of a presentation on women’s
suffrage, Jane was too fed up to mention the flawed logic of this – or to say no. She snatched the varnish bottle from Julie’s hand and pushed her against the washstand. When she had done the nails on the left hand, she said between her teeth:
‘Next.’
But Julie was staring absently into the mirror.
‘Julie!’
‘Sure.’
She gripped the girl’s right wrist hard and started on the thumbnail. Her movements grew brisker, and more determined. When she was ready to start on the ring finger, Julie cautiously freed her hand and said in a small voice, that was enough. It was fine like that.
DURING THE ENTIRE THIRD DAY in the mountains, Jane had nothing to look at except Ulf’s rucksack and muscular legs. He walked through the mist guided by a compass. She was a three-year-old trailing after a cross grown-up.
They put the tent up in streaming rain. She held the sheets down against the gusts of wind while Ulf attached the guys to the tent pegs. He had made no new attempts to get close to her and barely uttered a word or two all day. Then, inside the tent, he suddenly said something nice.
‘Jane, we’re quite different people, you and I. But we share this: we are in the middle of a windy wasteland far from people. In a figurative sense as well.’
Then he produced a plastic bottle from somewhere and poured liquid from it into two small, metal cups.
‘I remember from the plane that you like whisky,’ he said.
‘If I had known what we had to look forward to, I would’ve walked faster.’
She had trudged along behind Ulf and popped pills as if they were off to a wilderness rave party. Valium didn’t seem to do much for her anymore.
‘Jane,’ he said without looking at her, and then shook his head slowly. Now he was either about to explain or admit something.
‘Ulf,’ she said in the same tone of voice.
He put the cup down on the groundsheet but kept holding on to it.
‘You realize, don’t you, that you must face up to things? That you can’t go on like this in the long run?’
She held out her cup.
‘With this cold…’ He hesitated while he poured her more whisky, so she completed his sentence.
‘…somehow resigned approach to life.’
‘That’s exactly what I was going to say.’
The wind tore at the top sheet and made the layers of the tent slap against each other.
‘Do you refuse to let yourself think about them?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I refuse to let myself begin to forget them.’
It was getting dark quickly now. Ulf’s face, full of shadows, looked handsome. Ulf was not so bad. She had met only a few people who were actually evil. People were like characters in novels, beautiful in their fragile inadequacy. Using whatever weapons at hand, they fought to join history for a while without screwing things up too much, and always failed somehow.
‘But you mustn’t forget yourself.’
That, too, was a fine thing to say.
It made her think of their first day up the mountain, when they had crossed a sunken area where the low, sage-like shrubs grew so densely that their leaves formed a smooth surface of matte silver. Ulf was up to his waist after taking just one step off the path. She stood still and followed him with her eyes as he moved about through the undergrowth like an animal. The sun was warming the moisture on the leaves, creating a sphere of whispering light around him. He clambered back onto the path, sniffing at something he held in his hand and then handed over to her. It was a tuft of wool, light and soft. She could just sense its presence on the palm of her hand. Three or four black hairs were mixed with the wool. The hairs were so thick she could roll them between her thumb and index finger.
‘Guard hairs,’ Ulf told her. ‘The white down is the inner layer. Musk oxen let the shrubs pull some of it off in the spring so they don’t die of overheating in the summer. Isn’t that great?’
His eyes had been shining with naked, childish enthusiasm but she had just shrugged.
Ulf drank a last slug of whisky and started to look around the tent.
‘I guess we’d better have something to eat,’ he said.
She slowly raised her hand, placed it on his. She had a vision of disappearing into somewhere strange, to force a feeling to emerge, a sensation powerful enough to dampen down all others. Like self-harm. He turned her hand over, squeezed it, began to stroke her palm with his index finger.
When Jane had decided to screw Ray Dechamps for the first time, they had been in the basement room in his parents’ place and David Lee Roth, played at max volume, was coming through from upstairs where Ray’s brother was partying with his friends. It had dawned on her just how tricky it would be to do this with her critical mind engaged, rather than abandoning all thought and clawing Ray’s back while he banged away for roughly as long as the guitar solo.
Afterwards, when they were lying together on top of the sleeping bags in the dense darkness, Ulf’s breathing sounded exaggerated, too heavy, as if after some sporting feat. She was cold but her clothes had ended up on the far side of Ulf. She felt like an envelope that had once contained an important document but had been reused for some other, insignificant purpose.
Ulf turned over and put his arm on her breasts. As she was lying on her back they had flattened so he had to grapple to get a good handful.
‘How was it for you?’
Oh, Christ.
She sat up but his hand followed her like an animal looking for warmth, and she had to lift it away before bending over him to grab her clothes.
Ulf fired up the primus stove. The heat intensified the smell of armpits and damp wool. Streaks of rainwater ran down the outside of the tent like oil in a greasy frying pan. They sat in silence at opposite ends of the tent and ate freeze-dried curried stew. Then Ulf broke the silence. As if time had stood still inside his head, he followed up what they had talked about the day before:
‘That great, superior entity of yours? Or is it a place? Is it where souls go?’
She had been considering if she shouldn’t tell him that she was done with this trip, and would prefer to back out. But it felt like admitting defeat.
‘The physicist deliberately didn’t use the word soul. He only spoke of awareness.’
‘Smart,’ Ulf remarked.
She so did not need to speak about that TED Talks lecture. Not any more. She was angry with herself for mentioning it. Tom Belotti had sent the link to the web page and she had been watching the lecture over and over again for three days. Tom had meant well. And he was the one who had found her. The door had been left open and two stove burners left on. His first thought was that she had killed herself. When he discovered her sitting in the study in front of the screen, his fear turned to rage that made his neck flare red. But he had taken her broken soul home with him to his kitchen and tried to patch her up with Vladlena’s help.
When she told them that she planned to go to Norway, Vladlena had said something in Russian.
‘What did she say, Tom?’
And Tom had replied, with a sigh, ‘That you remind her of an animal that leaves the herd in order to die alone.’
Vladlena had punched him on the shoulder.
‘But that is what you said!’
‘Yes. Not go, Jane,’ Vladlena told her.
‘Listen, this guy surely thought the point was that it should be possible to meet those you loved and missed in some form or another? That in the greater whole, you can meet again?’ Ulf asked.
‘I recommend you listen to his lecture,’ Jane said.
‘Sorry. But that thought has nothing to offer except false reassurance.’
To refute the idea seemed to mean something positive to Ulf.
‘I think you should consider a different line of thought, Jane. To think that your sense of loss can be understood as nothing more or less – like everything else – than atoms and molecules. Electrochemical signals, endlessly fired off.’
Ulf moved and knelt in front of the stove to shut the gas feed off. The wheezing ended and the tent filled with a stillness that laid everything to waste.
She didn’t know what made her continue. ‘It’s the last mystery for science.’
‘What is?’
‘Life and death.’
‘What, have you found stuff online about that, too?’
He folded the gas stove’s supports before putting it away in a small container. Then Ulf got his evening routine underway: he lay down on his back and began pulling off one woollen sock. She clenched her jaw. His thigh was level with her eyes.
‘We have a pretty good idea of what life is,’ he said with a slight effort.
Then he straightened out again, placed the first sock on his chest and folded it slowly and methodically.
‘We can introduce an electric current into a mixture of appropriate chemicals and create elements of organic life.’
He groaned as he reached for his other foot. Possibly, this was to impress her by showing that he could get his socks off.
She longed for Greg as someone who is suffocating longs for air.
Ulf took out his nasal spray and shot a dose up first one nostril, then the other.
‘And we can end the process in an analogous way,’ he said through a rather blocked nose. ‘Mass doesn’t disappear after death. And there is no evidence for consciousness being anything other than the sum of neural functions that shape our perceptions of the world.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘The thing is…’ He was pointing at her with the nasal spray. ‘You people believe that we’re after something when we tell you these things. But the facts we uncover are in no way charged with meaning. Not by us, anyway. They are just facts.’
She wondered about Ulf’s motives. Was he trying to toughen her up by telling her harsh truths? Or was he furious because his penis hadn’t taken her straight into seventh heaven? She turned away from him and pulled the sleeping bag over the back of her head.
‘I simply tell you the way things are. All you can do, Jane…’