Fireraiser

by Torkil Damhaug

  The classrooms were still located at the far end of the basement corridor. On one of the doors was an embroidered cloth sign with the word Schoolroom. Unmistakably the zero point. Probably full of easily combustible material. And perfectly situated. Smoke alarms had been fitted to the ceiling at each end of the corridor. Even if he disconnected them, the ones in the floors above would work and everyone who was in the house would have time to get out. It wasn’t the people he was after; this was about the building itself. He alone decided what would happen to it. It was his building now.

  He remembered that there were changing rooms further down. Opened the door to the first one. The girls’ changing room. Still a smell of perfume in there. He’d sneaked down several times, when he knew that Siv was there.

  Past the boys’ changing room were the stairs. He stopped and listened. Heard a faint, dark voice, a lighter one that responded, then music. The night-duty guy watching TV, he realised. The living room was at the end of the corridor above, directly over the basement door he had just come through. At the top of the stairs he stood and sifted among the smells in the brightly lit hallway, examining each one individually. Something had been baked in the kitchen: bread, pizza maybe. The smell of spices mingling with green soap, dust, people who sweated and breathed and farted and went to the toilet. The sound from the TV was still low, but clear; the door to the sitting room was ajar. Light flickered in the dark room. The film was American, he could tell by the accents. The night watch was probably dozing on the sofa; they always did that.

  The stairs up to the first floor were halfway along the corridor. He walked quietly. At one point the linoleum was sticky. His sole stuck to it, released itself with a pop. He stopped, waited; nothing happened.

  Upstairs had been redecorated. Brighter colours, new cornices, new doors too. There were names on some of them. Marita, written on a cardboard sign below a pressed flower. Sveinung on another, printed along with some characters from Star Wars. Someone named Bizhan had contented himself with his name scribbled on a yellow Post-it note. It was the next door he was interested in. Fourth room on the left. There was no sign outside it. Maybe the room was empty. Maybe the person who lived there would have nothing to do with the place. The way he had been himself.

  He eased the door open slightly, listened into the darkness. Silence at first, then a faint whistling sound, breath so light that it just about escaped from sleep. He slipped inside, pulled the door to behind him, stood there with eyes closed. This room had haunted him for years after he was let out. It could still appear in his dreams, or at any other time. Smelled different now. The strong whiff of deodorant made him think of ‘Teen Spirit’, a scent with noise inside it. I feel stupid and contagious. In the days when he was kept at the home, there was rot somewhere or other, the smell of damp in every room.

  He took a step into the room and knocked against a chair. Clothes slung over the back of it. He felt them. Jeans, pullover, socks. He held a pair of knickers in his hand. They were tiny, and he stood there inhaling the smooth material, drawing that strong and bitter girl-smell down inside himself.

  A sound made him start. He heard her more clearly now. The rhythm of her breathing had changed after he came in, was faster, as though she had tipped over into a different type of sleep. Maybe she was dreaming that a strange man had just entered her room. That he crawled in under the blanket and lay down next to her. But he hadn’t come here for something like that. There was a way of getting rid of memories. Everything he had thought into the walls during the year in which he was held there. Purification by fire. Therapy, it struck him, I have worked out my own fucking therapy.

  He kept the laughter inside, moved soundlessly across the floor. The bed was in the same position it had always been, with the headboard in the corner by the window. The outline of a head, short dark hair, could just be made out against the white of the pillow. Suddenly he felt that the girl was lying there staring at him.

  – Bizhan, she whispered.

  A few seconds went by before he remembered that was the name on the Post-it note on the room next door. He bent down slowly over her. Her eyes were open, and now he could not stop the movement towards them, had to keep going until he saw them properly in the dark. So close that he could see the mouth open, because now she knew that it wasn’t Bizhan who was leaning over her bed.

  He was quicker than her, pressed his fist against her lips, forcing them together, felt the scream come, forced it back down the narrow throat, held it there. Should say something to this girl, something to calm her, but she mustn’t hear his voice. At that moment a pain from his index finger shot up through his arm. He hissed, pressed harder, already knew that there would be a mess, drops of his blood that ran down her cheek and dripped on to the pillow.

  – You should not have done that, he growled. Then she bit again, even harder, and he put all his weight on to his hand. It was like holding the jaws of a small animal shut, a vole or a ferret. With his other hand he pulled the pillow out from under her and put it over the biting mouth. She turned, her hands shot up and began to claw him. He covered the whole face with the pillow, sat on it, the movements became wilder, he had to turn round and hold her body down.

  Somewhere in his thoughts he was counting off the seconds, because he knew he could not sit there like that for very long. But the little animal twisted and thrashed, began kicking out too now, and he could hear the scream that would rise out of that little mouth if he got up. He counted slowly. Allowed himself to think of nothing else but the numbers. After forty-five she was still jerking from side to side, but the kicking had stopped. He carried on counting. At sixty he would let her up. There was an interval there, he decided, a gap between the phase in which she bit and screamed and the point at which she would never scream again.

  – It’s you I’m counting for, Elsa, he whispered, – even though you went off with your prince. You are the one who will let me stop in time, you want me to choose the good.

  He reached sixty-five. She was still now. He stood up and took the pillow away. The eyes still stared up into the darkness, but in a different way, and he put a hand against her mouth. No sign of breathing. He pulled the duvet off her, pressed his ear to her chest. Leant forward and covered the little mouth with his own, blew into it, twice, three times, stopped, waited for the chest to begin to move by itself. Carried on blowing, pushing the ribcage, pressed down so hard that the bottom of the bed snapped, did it again ten or twenty times, breathed again down into the mouth, tasted blood, his own.

  Suddenly he heard something from out in the corridor, the pop of a sole sticking to the linoleum. He jumped up, stood in the corner by the cupboard. He could hear that the approaching footsteps were a man’s. They stopped outside, a door was opened.

  No light. Motionless and bent over, he stood there and heard the night watch talking in a low voice to someone in the next room. In the darkness by the window he could just make out the bed, the duvet on the floor, an arm dangling over the side.

  He ran the four or five hundred metres to the copse where his car was parked, opened the back and grabbed the carrier bag with the bottles of lighter fluid. From behind the felt flap in the doorpost he pulled out the bag with the ignition devices, knew that he couldn’t risk using them but still shoved them into his pocket, felt that there was already something in there. His fingers closed around the silky piece of cloth he had taken from the room. In a flash it occurred to him that the girl to whom it belonged had become a part of the building, a part of what had to disappear.

  Back in the basement, he stood gasping for breath. As though he were still breathing for the tiny little girl in the room as well. Other thoughts would come, he knew that, and with them would come the sight of that dangling arm, the smell of deodorant, the stabbing pain of his bitten finger. But for now he concentrated on what had to be done, step by step. The part of him that had been asleep all winter had now woken up again. He was trained to lead a group of men in battle. Tactics that
had to be changed while approaching an enemy position. He forced the crowbar into the crack of the schoolroom door and pulled. The sounds of the building had changed; something was rushing through them. It dawned on him that it was his own breath he was hearing. He held it. Then there was only the throbbing of his pulse that echoed around the basement corridor, filling it.

  The room he now entered was just as it had been, with a blackboard, the teacher’s desk and a few work tables. In a cupboard he found rolls of cotton cloth, cut it up and made heaps of it. He made three fireplaces around the room, drenched in lighter fluid. Still not satisfied, because the play of chance must not be allowed to decide here, he had to insure himself by creating several more such points. The door between the two schoolrooms was unlocked. The second room was mainly used for timeouts if someone was causing too much trouble. He pushed the door open; it knocked into something or other. As he arrested the movement, he realised he was too late. Something collapsed and toppled over, chairs stacked together probably, and a zinc bucket or something like that, which hit the washbasin with a resounding crash.

  For a few seconds he stood motionless, trying to suck the sounds into himself, prevent them from leaving the room. Then he ran out into the corridor. He heard a door upstairs. Already the sound of footsteps, the same ones he had heard approaching the girl’s bedroom, that little pop of the sole as it came unstuck from the linoleum. He slipped into the girls’ changing room, stood still in the darkness beside the row of cupboards. Now the steps were down in the basement.

  – Bizhan?

  The voice was light for a man’s. He was seized by a painful need to do something to it. As the footsteps passed on their way towards the schoolroom, he banged the crowbar against the changing room cupboard. The footsteps stopped.

  – Bizhan?

  He scraped the side of the cupboard a few times. The screeching sound of metal against metal slowed his pulse rate, abruptly he felt calm and clear headed.

  – Are you in there?

  Light from the corridor spread out like a fan. He stood in the darkness just beyond it and stared at the outline of the night watch in the open doorway. Someone small and thin, suited to the voice. He saw the hand on the wall, fumbling for the switch. As the neon tubes in the ceiling blinked into life, he stepped forward, his eyes met those of the night watch in the mirror. Then he struck out. The crowbar hit the man on the side of his back. He struck out again as the night watch tried to turn, his hands held up, hit him higher, on the back of the head. The guy was thrown against the wall. He grabbed hold of the wispy neck hair and beat the head against the mirror so hard that it broke and the shards showered down into the sink. Kept on beating until the man collapsed, toppling the rubbish bin, and lay slumped at his feet like an empty sack.

  He raced back to the schoolroom, emptied the rest of the lighter fluid across the floor, squirted it as high up the walls as he could reach. Then he set fire to the strips of cloth and tossed them about. The flames leapt up, as though the room had been waiting years for this to happen. In a window between the tongues of fire he caught an image of himself, his face glowing white and unrecognisable.

  As he backed out into the basement corridor he noticed that the door to the girls’ changing room was wide open. The figure on the floor in there still lay motionless in a twisted pose. It occurred to him that he ought to drag the man out.

  For two or three seconds he held on to that thought. Then he shut the door and ran out into the cold night.

  14

  Jasmeen was sitting at a computer next to the counter. Glanced up as Karsten came down the steps. He walked past her, over to one of the bookcases. He had never been to the library in Lørenskog before. While he waited for something to happen, he took down a book on fish, flipping through it as slowly as he could. Two minutes, maybe three, and she was behind him, moving closer, her hand touching his back. At the end of the bookcase she stopped and bent over to one side, as though she were reading the titles on the spines of the books.

  He took a step towards her.

  – Don’t talk to me, she whispered, and moved her eyes in the direction of the floor above.

  He stood there half turned away. Noticed that she wrote something in one of the books, saw her put it back and disappear out the other way.

  The book was protruding from the shelf; it was about fish too. At the bottom of the title page, written in a thin, even hand, he read: Go out the top exit, cross the road, past the entrance to the garden centre, wait for me at the end of the block.

  The flakes that came floating down made him think of white insects. They landed in his hair and dissolved. In the pitch dark a car swung up and away from the garden centre. Karsten didn’t know anyone here, but even so he withdrew into the driveway to someone’s garage. Fifteen minutes passed. The melting snowflakes trickled down from his hair and over his forehead. She had asked him to meet her. He was there to talk to her, nothing else. There could never be anything between them. But Adrian was right: fear mustn’t be allowed to dictate our choices. At least not all of them. Why Adrian was even interested in what he did was something Karsten still hadn’t understood.

  Twenty-five minutes. He stepped back on to the road again. – What does she want with me? he muttered in exasperation. Then he saw her heading towards him along the footpath.

  – Sorry you had to wait, she exclaimed. – Bilal just kept going on and on.

  She stroked his cheek, twice. He forgot how annoyed he’d been, took her hand.

  – Someone might see us, she protested quietly. – Everyone round here knows me.

  That couldn’t be true, but she turned, walked ahead further down the road, across a snowdrift and into some trees next to a factory. He caught up with her.

  – Who’s Bilal? he wanted to know.

  – My brother, who else? she said, sounding angry. – Drives me crazy having him follow me about everywhere.

  She explained that her nosy little brother was being told to spy on her for the family. Then she stood there looking at him, saying nothing, as though waiting for him to do something or other. In an attempt to kiss her, he pressed her body up against a pine trunk and a shower of droplets fell on them.

  – Sorry, he muttered, and now she began to laugh.

  Twice before he had kissed a girl. Once was on a sofa at a class party in junior school and he thought it had gone pretty well. But then the girl got up, allegedly to go to the toilet, and never came back again. The second time was also on a sofa and he had decided never, ever to think about it again. But beneath that dripping pine on an industrial estate in Lørenskog one evening in April, it was exactly this memory that returned, and the image of Tonje backing away, staring at him open mouthed as though she had just found an insect in her food.

  Now he pressed his mouth determinedly against Jasmeen’s. To his surprise he felt it open, felt his tongue suddenly dart between her lips and encounter another, small and slippery. Something about the taste of her made him think of fresh chlorine water, but sweet rather than bitter, and in his mind’s eye he saw the diagram of a tongue in his biology book with the different taste buds drawn in. When he opened his eyes, he was looking directly into hers. Suddenly she gave him a careful bite on the lip. He bit back, much too hard, he realised, because she pulled away.

  – Sorry, he said again, and again she gave that little laugh.

  – I’ve been thinking about you all night, she whispered as she pulled him in to her, and he concluded that she would hardly have said those exact words if he’d already been voted off.

  – Thought about you too.

  It sounded okay, but he knew that soon he would have to say something that wasn’t just an echo of what she had said. Something occurred to him, something about the genes of the fish, but he realised it would be the wrong thing to start talking about. – Can’t we just say screw them? he heard himself suggest. But that was wrong too. He didn’t even know what he meant by it.

  She laid her forehead agains
t his. – You don’t understand anything. You who know everything about trigonometry and differential calculus. And now I have to get back.

  He nodded. At least that was what it felt like.

  – And you mustn’t call me any more.

  He looked down into her eyes. In the pale light they seemed to loom towards him, like jellyfish or some other aquatic creature drifting up to the surface on the currents of the deep.

  – We need to think of something, she said, and he nodded again, as though this was the type of problem that had to have a solution. – Wait here until you can’t see me any more.

  He held her from behind and wouldn’t let her go. Then she unbuttoned her coat, the top buttons, put his hands inside and pressed them against her breasts. For a few moments he felt as though he was in free fall, and he was about to shout out or laugh. He clenched his teeth as hard as he could.

  – Jasmeen!

  It wasn’t him shouting. The voice came from somewhere on the street, a child’s voice. She tensed and pulled away.

  – Hide, she whispered, pushed him towards the tree and walked away over the snowdrift.

  He did as she told him, stood there half shadowed and tried to fade away, become one with the hard bark of the pine tree.

  The microwave started to ping. Karsten padded into the kitchen. Took out the lasagne and called out to Synne. His sister looked tired as she came down the stairs.

  – Were you asleep?

  She didn’t answer.

  – You can’t start going to bed and sleeping in the middle of the day, he warned her.

  – None of your business.

  It would have been okay if things were that easy. He had enough to worry about already. He’d met a girl he shouldn’t have met. He would rather not see her again. And most of all he wished the doorbell would ring right now, that she would be standing outside when he opened the door.