Torvald took a step back a long time ago when it comes to Mum and Dad. He now looks to other adults. But I’m still on their side, because I don’t know what else I’d do. We go to the sports shop and Dad talks circles round the assistant and haggles until in the end we take a slightly used leather ball home with us for thirty kroner.
Dad can’t and I can’t, and yet we can all the same.
The bell rings and Class 1B leap up from their desks and chairs. I take out the football that I’ve kept in a net attached to my backpack. It’s my ball. We’re going to play now. We’ve got the same team as in the last break. The football pitch is enormous. Wide goals. Most people kick the ball when it comes to them. Surprised and without much thought. Some dribble and dribble until they meet too many defence legs and get caught up.
I love playing. I’m on my own with the ball in front of the opponent’s goalkeeper. Completely free. It’s just a matter of kicking it in. I dribble and feint, but miss the shot altogether. And me who’s so confident. A few people laugh. No goal when it’s all clear. My team mates have disappointed backs.
A while later I get another chance. And miss again. ‘Why don’t you play defence?’ one of the boys asks. ‘I’m playing well,’ I say. I want to score a goal, but I don’t say that. One of the substitutes pokes me. ‘You have to switch. You’re no good. We need to win.’
I am good. I think I’m the best. I go over to the ball and pick it up. ‘What are you doing?’ one of the girls asks. ‘Free kick,’ someone else shouts. ‘Put it back,’ a boy tells me. I hold the ball to my chest and say: ‘It’s my ball.’
‘You’re ruining everything,’ a voice says, and then another and all the children follow me like a long tail as I walk towards the school holding the ball tight against my chest. It can’t be helped, I think. I walk faster than all of them and they stop and shout after me: ‘Spoilsport!’ It can’t be helped. I can’t stop.
I walk past the school and across the street and into the churchyard. I sit down by a grave. It says Viktor on the gravestone and no one has tended it for a long time. ‘Viktor, Viktor,’ I say. The tears fall. I’m stupid. When you’re playing, it’s everyone’s ball. I know that. But can’t help it.
‘Eli’s not here,’ Espen says. ‘She’s definitely not here. It’s me, Espen. I come in tears, I come in water. You have to score a goal.’
‘I can’t,’ I say. Then I add: ‘I know that I can.’ ‘I, I, I...’ stammers Espen. It’s Espen who’s stammering. Words normally just pour out of me.
‘I have to stop crying. I can’t go around with tears in my body all day. I’m doing it because you’re here. You’re floating all around me and taking over. I’m stammering because of you. Because you change direction and place and make a fuss and shout at me when no one can see.’
‘Hide,’ Espen shouts. ‘The janitor’s coming. Hide!’
‘Good day, little Miss Eli, the prettiest girl in the class and the best football player. Always ready with the ball.’ He stretches out his foot and nudges the ball with his toes. ‘Why are you sitting here in the churchyard? I thought I just heard the bell.’
‘I, I, I...’
The janitor coaxes the ball up onto his foot and gives a few kicks before he misses and the ball falls down dead on the grass. I quickly pick off the scab from a cut on my knee. It starts to bleed. ‘Why are you sitting here crying?’ the janitor asks, when he’s stopped playing with the ball. If only I could say something about Espen. About a voice that shouts without being visible.
‘Oh, but you’ve cut yourself, I understand,’ the janitor says. I like him because he gets it wrong. Thinks I’m the best football player when I’m not.
‘Yes,’ I sob. He gives me his hand. ‘Come on then, I’ll take you back to school.’
There’s a ring at the door. It’s my cognitive therapist. He’s the one who’s asked me to practise turning the voices on and off. He’s the one who’s asked me to practise not having them around when others are there. We respect them, but they have to wait.
‘Say no,’ my therapist says. I don’t answer. ‘Say it out loud,’ he says. I say no and nothing happens. I don’t crack.
The therapist takes off his jacket and sits down. He has a retro sports bag that reminds me of my bag. He has a file for all the things we talk about. We sit down in the kitchen. I also have a file, and write: Tell them to wait. They can wait, I’m in control. I’m the one who decides.
I tell him about Espen. About how he popped up when I was only six years old. ‘You know that Espen the Ash Lad is called Dummerjöns in Swedish,’ my therapist says. Even Espen has moved country. I’ve found, I’ve found something. But not a new name.
I only notice now that my therapist has cut his hair. His long ponytail has vanished and he has a new image. A fringe, long over the ears and short at the back. I look at him and suddenly he has a name. Jonathan. But how can I trust him?
Dad leans forward. I quickly jump out of the way. I don’t know whether he’s going to hit me or hug me. I listen to Espen’s whispered warnings. He might hit me. A clip on the ear. A shove. A fist. You never know.
Dad does the same thing with his mouth as me. He pulls nervous faces. He stretches out his long arms. Hands reaching through the air. He wants to tickle me. I force a laugh. I run through the house. Dad runs after me. Is today a play day? You never know.
Dad catches me in his dangerous and playful arms. He hugs me close. He is warm and soft and smells of tobacco and grown-ups. But he’s not grown up. He wants me to tickle him back.
I’m back in the unit again. They’ve been nagging me for days to have a shower and change my clothes. I don’t like getting wet. I like rain, but not the shower. It’s not raining and I’m not allowed out. I don’t like water on my naked body and then I get cold afterwards and the towel is too small and the room gets chilly as soon as the hot water is turned off.
I lie on my bed and stare up at the ceiling. Listen to music in my headphones. Can’t stop. ‘You can stop,’ Espen says. ‘I can’t stop,’ I say. ‘You can,’ Espen says. I stand up suddenly, put away my MP3 player and go out to the shower room. There is a kiss mark in red lipstick on the mirror. I turn on the hot water, but don’t get undressed. I sit down under the water. Feel my clothes fall heavy against my body. I just sit there and let it continue. I think about nothing.
Then I hear Espen crying. ‘You’re a grown woman now, you shouldn’t be sitting here. You shouldn’t be locked up. The doors and windows are locked. How can you just accept that?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I comfort Espen. ‘I’m just waiting. It’ll all be fine again soon.’
I can’t explain to Espen why I’m here again. So instead I think about football training sessions in the rain. I open my mouth and drink. The water runs into my mouth and then out again in an unceasing stream. My clothes stick to my body. Espen cries. I wait for him to calm down. Simply disappear one day. That is what he doesn’t understand and I keep it secret from him, that one day I won’t give him any room. That I want to be just Eli.
But it’s not today, because now I can hear him crying and I just have to sit under the warm water and wait. I think about running between cones in the cold and rain. Endless sit-ups. About dribbling with the ball between two lines on the football pitch. That you haven’t played football until you’ve had to sit out. I’ve sat on the bench. With everyone else’s football jackets in a pile on my knees, just praying that someone will play badly or be injured so I can take her place. I would be the cool player with the ball inside the penalty area.
I haven’t played football for ten years now. But I’m right there again. In the match. I want to be the one who stays calm in the chaos of all the legs and who dares make the final move and kicks the ball into the net. I turn up the warm water. I was the one who took corners and had hard-hitting free kicks. Don’t forget that. I move so that all of me is under the spray. I mustn’t get cold. Because I can’t leave here. I have to sit here until time turns back and I’m playing
football again and have a chance of being selected to the national team.
Winter is my best time of year. I do lap after lap on my skis in the forest behind the house. Someone has built a jump on the steepest slope. I jump the longest of anyone. I dare and I can. I’m out until late in the evening and come home cold and hungry. I’m allowed to do what I like. Come home when I like and eat when I like.
I say that I don’t have any homework. Put on my pyjamas and sit in the kitchen eating banana and smoked cod roe sandwiches. I’m in Class 3 and have not learnt to read and write. I, who was so excited about starting school. I was in a rush to learn because I had so many stories to save, now I’m the worst in the class. The teacher says I’m dyslexic. I still love stories and make up my own instead of reading them.
Long after Dad has snapped closed the covers of the books that already exist, long after the light has been put out and my brother Torvald has fallen asleep, I lie in the dark telling stories. Continue the children’s books, carry on where the story stops. I’m quite happy for it to be about princesses, but I don’t want to look like one any more. I want to be Emil of Lönneberga. With a blue cap and a wooden gun. I’ve started to dress like him. My long hair blowing under my blue cap.
My brother Torvald can sit in silence for an hour, looking at comics or spinning a globe and memorising the countries of the world. I race around and can’t sit still. Torvald doesn’t wet his bed at night or make grimaces with his mouth. He doesn’t seem to care about the world, outside or in. Or does he, in fact? Know how to live. Counting up all the countries in Africa and feeling happy. I want to be like him.
When we were little, people often said: ‘There’s the girl, and there is the boy.’ They would give him a friendly pat on the shoulder and listen to whatever he had to say. They always patted me on the head and said what beautiful hair I had.
Would it have been easier for me if I was a boy? Am I a boy? I’m too nervous. All I know is this. Mum and Dad’s bodies are dangerous. Not always. But you never know. Their words of comfort that don’t comfort. I can’t get what I want when I don’t know what it is.
Mum is always tired. She who has to deal with everything. Who can’t go to pieces. But is already on her knees. Who has a job simply surviving. Who knows I exist but not what I need. I, who unleash my desperation in piercing cries. Like a bird. Cries that rip through the walls in our small house. It’s Torvald who gives me an invisible sign to let them loose. He listens to my cries in silence, but he is the one who has decided that it’s time.
Dad is the most dangerous, but also the warmest. When you can lie next to him in bed and listen to him reading, you feel safe. I’m squeezed against the wall and feel his body against mine. Listen to his steady breathing and just want him to carry on reading. When he disappears into the world of the story, nothing dangerous can happen. He doesn’t need to be frightened and I don’t need to be frightened. No one shouts at us. We’re busy.
Torvald falls asleep and I whisper to Dad: ‘A bit more.’
‘It’s your turn now,’ Dad says. And I start to tell my story. He listens to me for a while, then slips out. When Torvald opens his eyes, he hears my voice telling the story as if I’ve been talking all night.
*
I hear talk of an American girl who published a book when she was eleven. I want to beat her record. I want to be nine, at the oldest. The book is called The Stone and is about Finn-Jon.
I stand beside my eldest sister, Marit, who is sitting at the typewriter. I dictate and she writes down the story. Once we’ve started, I can’t stop. It doesn’t matter whether it’s time for lunch, supper, children’s TV, to get ready for bed, bedtime story or sleep. Just forget it. It keeps coming. I can’t stop now.
I’m a real writer. I’m tough, beautiful, I’m full of words and know it. At that same time I wet my bed in my sleep every night and dream horrible dreams. I’m alone in the forest or an enormous house with endless stairs. I keep losing the others. My teacher, my classmates, Mum, Dad, Marit, Hild, Torvald and little Odd. When I turn around they’re gone.
I sit beside Dad on the slope up to the church and do a painting. I’ve been allowed to use proper oil paints, the ones he uses. We each have a palette to mix our colours. But I don’t mix mine. Dad says using black is not allowed. It doesn’t exist in nature. There are only darker nuances of other colours. So the black has to be mixed with other colours. I only use black. Wonder if white exists in nature. Because then the painting could be finished before I even started.
We paint a church with big chestnut trees and old gravestones in front of it. I don’t get room for the whole church on my canvas. Only the middle of the church. Two big windows. Dad has room for the whole thing, plus the trees and part of a gravestone. I praise his painting. He likes that. And I know that he likes me. I know that he likes me sitting slightly behind him and painting like him. He thinks I’m learning. But I just do what I want and it turns out well all the same. He holds his brush up in front of his face and measures. I hold my hand up in front of one eye. And look. Open my fingers. You don’t see half the world with one eye.
It’s snowing and winter. I tell stories to the younger children on the street. Their parents ask my mum where they can buy the books I get my stories from. ‘They’re not published yet,’ she says, ‘but they will be one day.’ I walk to and from school with my classmates. Walking with me is popular. The others listen with curiosity. I’ve taught myself dramatic composition. When we get close to school in the morning, I finish with a real cliff-hanger. Something exciting so they’ll want to hear more. And now it’s time finally to go home and for the continuation.
Suddenly I have to sit down. I sit down in a snowdrift and press the heel of my boot against my bladder. I don’t stop the story. The others sit round me in a ring. It’s the conclusion. It’s quite a funny ending. The person in the mask is our teacher. I get up. The others laugh.
But not at the story. They laugh at the yellow puddle in the snow where I’ve been sitting.
I don’t wash. I lie on the bed and wait for a miracle. I’m grown up now. I’m big and I’m small. Can’t wake up. Can’t sleep. Those who are totally paralysed see nothing.
At the depths of the moment, I tie a small knot. And so life continues. I’m up at night and in bed all day. Short periods back and forth. The world is locked and I’m not there. For better or worse.
I’ve been out to the kitchen and made myself some coffee and a sandwich. Take it back to bed with me. Start to eat. Haven’t eaten cooked food for a long time.
The doorbell rings. It’s Jonathan.
‘Have you been in bed with the voices all day?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’ I ask the voices to hide me so that no one can find me. So I can’t find myself.
‘You haven’t been following the programme. And what is that food doing there? Look in the file. Your bed is only to be used for sleep.’
Every time the doorbell rings in our small house I think that someone is dead. That it’s the minister who has come. If you dare, you can look out of the kitchen window and see who is there. I’ve seen it on TV. How the dark figure approaches with bowed head, anxious eyes and sad tidings.
I get pains in my stomach. My head feels hot. Tears are waiting in my eyes. Crying. Bird cries. Fractures. No one can die. There can’t be a now and a then when everything is different. Where Mum or Dad no longer exists.
I can’t bear the world as it is, but it would be even worse if it was different.
I can tear a whole room to shreds. It’s impossible to stop the destruction. The cries and tears. It might be a drawing that isn’t ready when Mum says it’s time to stop. If I can’t finish my drawing, I might as well wreck the house. Or the classroom at school. If the bell rings and it’s time to go home and I’m in the middle of something, I go to pieces. ‘Please stop kicking, hitting, crying and screaming, can’t you talk properly and tell us what’s wrong,’ the adults coax. But that’s precisely what I can’t do. Not n
ow. Not yet.
But now, now I can tell stories. I am the one who tells the stories and who the stories are about. A writer knows so little, so if she learns something she has to make sure it doesn’t get lost.
I write. The only thing we can change is the past, someone once said. Jonathan wouldn’t agree with that.
I’ve just lit the tiled stove in my workspace. I’m going to give a talk about using personal experience in creative writing. We’re bad witnesses. Of our own life even. But we’re good at creating stories. We make the event sensible. We are filled with what we already know from similar situations.
Memory is also an excellent source when you work with stories, but less so in the courtroom. The more time that has passed since something happened, the more certain we are that we have remembered it correctly. And what were loose threads to begin with, have become a personal story.
I talk on and on. Write down key words. I want to give the students hope. You yourself are a well of stories. Draw from it.
Dad has been working for over a month. Everyone is happy about it. We know that it’s payday today. He has his pay in an envelope and has walked up the long hill from the tram stop. He’s gone into every shop on the way.
We sit around the kitchen table and see him coming. Mum is uneasy. He stands in the middle of the kitchen and produces a bunch of flowers from behind his back. Mum is furious. ‘Where’s the money?’ she shouts. ‘You can’t buy flowers when we’ve got no food on the table. What else have you bought?’ Dad laughs, even though he can see that Mum is angry. He wants to put on a show for us children.
‘Beef steak.’ He puts down a big bloody lump wrapped in paper. We’ve only ever eaten whale beef at home and get excited about tasting this treat. We’ve only heard mention of normal beef at the neighbours when they asked if we like beef and we said yes, thinking they meant cheap whale beef.
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