I run my hands over the table between us, scraping decades of dust and dirt on to the floor to reveal the glass beneath. It feels as though I’ve landed in a place reserved for the dead and dying, a transit station where both the faceless woman and I are waiting to journey onwards, from one state to the next.
All of a sudden the music stops: the sound system has had enough and an uncomfortable silence spreads through the room, broken only by the hum of the motor that drives the disco ball on the ceiling and the sporadic, rasping – almost gasping – noise of the smoke machine.
‘Can something have gone wrong somewhere?’ I rub the sleeve of my jacket on the glass surface of the table until it is clean enough. ‘A crossed connection between you and her?’ I empty my pockets of boxes, blister packs and pill dispensers, pick out the tablets I want and deploy them on the table. ‘You see – I was to meet someone else out here.’
I arrange the pills and capsules in rows on the table that separates us until in the end they form a word. I point at the name constructed of four pill and capsule letters and look up at the ice maiden facing me. ‘Her.’ I scan the room, with a smile on my face. ‘They’ve organised this party for us.’
The room is not as murky now that the music has been switched off. I snatch some of the pills that form the letter F, summoning saliva to swallow them down. I’m about to grab a few more when the music abruptly strikes up again. A jarring crackle rings out from the loudspeakers and drums start up, with Rick Astley back to his promises of loyalty and perseverance.
Once again the dust begins to whirl and gyrate around the room, in time to the roar from the loudspeakers. I take out my mobile phone and key in one final number. It’s someone I need to talk to before I am ready. ‘Thorkild?’ Liz’s voice is soft, warm, and as always contains a hint of ambivalent anticipation, wondering which Thorkild she is addressing this time.
‘Hi, Liz,’ I slur, trying to shield my mouth from the dust.
‘Where are you?’
‘At a disco,’ I grunt, grabbing more pills from the table in front of me.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m at a disco,’ I say quietly, letting my eyes drift towards the motorised disco ball that creaks as it twirls round and round. The smoke machine looks as if it has run out of smoke – from time to time it emits a few feeble spluttering sounds followed by grey clouds of dust that shoot across the dance floor to be sucked into the bigger piles of ancient grime that are swirling around. ‘Out at the lighthouse.’
‘But … what?’
‘Somebody has arranged a party for us here.’
‘For who?’ she asks, sounding tense. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘A party for the dead.’ I guzzle the rest of the F and the whole of the R from the glass table. ‘And for those soon to follow in their footsteps.’ I fill my mouth with more of the insect eggs as my eyes survey the surreal dance hall swathed in dust and dotted with flashing lights.
‘Are you angry with me?’
‘No, Liz. I’m not angry.’ My body has stopped aching, and I have a strange feeling inside, the one that I had when I boarded a plane for the USA. That had been only a few days after Ann-Mari and I had submitted our divorce papers, applying to have our marriage dissolved once and for all.
The mediation process and period of separation had not helped – nothing would help, we’d known that all along. The one thing separation had achieved was to amplify the distance between us. While I sat there looking out of the window, watching the plane climb skyward before eventually arriving on the other side of the ocean, it struck me that the old Thorkild would never be able to accompany me out of the aircraft when we landed at Miami International Airport eleven and a half hours later. Just as it had been a new Thorkild who had been carried from the showers down in the basement of Stavanger Prison one and a half years later, and yet another who had walked out through the prison gates barely a week ago.
In fact there have been many Thorkilds. Too many. Even before that, from the time when that other person left his first home in Iceland and travelled with his mother and Liz to Norway, to Oslo, such a very long time ago. But this is the final version. The era of all the Thorkilds is over.
‘Have I told you about the pipe, Liz?’ The dust swirling thick in the room, from floor to ceiling, is stinging my eyes and nose. Somewhere in my diaphragm, the boulder is still pressing with no intention of budging.
‘No,’ she whispers. ‘You haven’t explained anything about what happened to you in prison.’
I tilt my head to one side so that I am sitting in a semi-upright position with my face turned to the wall and the woman opposite me at the table. ‘Well, then, it’s about time,’ I say, slurring my words, as I shut my eyes. ‘Before the doors close and the band goes home.’
CHAPTER 39
Stavanger Prison, 13 February 2012
Robert, Arne Villmyr’s lover and Frei’s dance partner, whom I’d met at the dance class at the Sølvberg Arts Centre, had sent me a letter in which he asked for permission to meet me after I had gone to jail. I could see him sitting out in the car park together with Arne the day he arrived. They’d kissed and embraced for a long time before he stepped out.
Stavanger Prison had four visitors’ rooms. Nineteen of us were shut up in the section called NORTH, the name they had allocated to the communal unit. Three of the visitors’ rooms were in use, since it was the winter holiday period. The only one vacant, normally used for family visits, had children’s drawings on the walls and was furnished with IKEA boxes filled with toys as well as a small drawing table for the youngsters. Two big Winnie-the-Pooh teddy bears were sprawled topsy-turvy at either end of a leather sofa, holding their arms out as if expecting a hug.
‘Are you ready?’ the liaison officer asked as we stood in the doorway of the visitors’ room and glanced inside. At the opposite end of the corridor I saw Robert approach, accompanied by a prison officer. He held his hands clasped in front of him and his head was lowered, as if he were a new inmate on his way to his first encounter with his fellow prisoners. ‘You’ve got half an hour,’ he added. ‘Afterwards, a mother is coming with her little boy to meet his father for the first time. We’ve reserved the family room for them for the rest of today’s visiting time.’
‘That’s fine,’ I answered, glancing over at the children’s corner, equipped with a blue and yellow mat on the floor under the table with drawing materials laid out and boxes of toys. On the mat there was a picture of two giraffes munching apples from an abnormally high apple tree.
‘Wait here,’ the liaison officer said, closing the door once Robert and the other officer were so close that I could hear their footsteps just outside.
I crossed to the sofa and sat down at one end beside one of the teddy bears. The next minute, the officer opened the door again to admit Robert. ‘OK, boys. Half an hour. I’ll be waiting outside.’
Robert paused for a second in the middle of the room as the door closed behind us. He was just as well dressed as the last time we had met, in suit trousers, a white shirt and a knotted scarf under his parka jacket. However, his facial features were somewhat coarser than I recalled, now that he was standing so close to me.
‘Just stay in your seat,’ he said as I made a move to stand. He untied his scarf and took it off, putting it down on the table together with his jacket. He ran his hands through his thick, black hair and sat at the opposite end of the sofa. He too found it hard to deposit the Winnie-the-Pooh bear down on the cold floor, with the result that he ended up holding it on his knee.
‘We haven’t really been introduced properly,’ he said, with no sign of initiating any kind of handshake.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘We met that time at the dance class, that’s all. What do you want?’
Robert nodded silently without responding to my question. In his letter, he had merely written that he had something to tell me, something we needed to discuss. After the accident I had returned to Bergen, to the bedsit where I rema
ined until the court case went ahead. I was suspended from my post in Internal Affairs as soon as the results of the blood tests had come through. The only person I had heard from had been my boss, Gunnar Ore, who phoned to ask me to stay away from the office and my colleagues, and not to speak to the press, before concluding by telling me to go and die in a ditch.
‘How’s it going with’ – he looked down his nose before continuing – ‘your face?’
Instinctively, I touched the red half-moon-shaped scar beside my eye. My finger slid down my cheek, where the skin had been torn in a star-shaped pattern, pulling the tear ducts below the surface.
‘Everything heals,’ I answered, withdrawing my finger as soon as I was aware of it tracing the contours of my face.
‘Everything heals, yes.’ He shifted position. ‘We buried Frei at home in Tananger.’ He sat at an angle at the end of the sofa, his legs dangling just above the floor. ‘You can go there when you get out, if you like. Arne and the family say that’s OK.’
‘Thanks.’ I reached across and pinched Winnie-the-Pooh’s ear hard with my fingers.
‘Her parents have left again. Arne is sitting outside in the car – he didn’t want to talk to you.’
I nodded without releasing the teddy bear’s ear.
‘It was me who gave Frei the GHB.’ Robert pressed his hands into the teddy bear’s belly as it sat on his lap. ‘That was why I had to speak to you. To tell you that.’
‘Why?’ I asked in a frosty tone.
Robert looked at me with a strange expression on his face. ‘Didn’t you know? Really?’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he continued. ‘I think you do know.’
I shrugged without letting go of the teddy bear. ‘Does it matter?’
‘No, maybe not.’ Robert went on gazing at me for a while before he ploughed on. ‘That was why I came. Because I had to tell you that.’
‘Have you told that to your boyfriend out there in the car and her parents too, for that matter?’
‘They know,’ he answered, again flashing that peculiar smile of his, or not a smile really, but something between a smile and a grimace. ‘You knew she had a boyfriend,’ Robert continued. ‘A … police officer at Police Headquarters here in Stavanger?’
Once again I shrugged my shoulders. Deep inside, I felt my body turn cold. ‘Simon Bergeland,’ I said eventually.
‘Yes, exactly. The officer you were here to investigate in that case of yours. A thief with a propensity for violence, an all-round scumbag whose world was about to come tumbling down around his ears because of your arrival in the city.’
I went on kneading the teddy bear’s ear. I could not bring myself to say anything, and just sat there while my insides writhed. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Why what, Thorkild?’ Robert’s half-smile had transformed into a slit devoid of anything other than contempt and loathing, not towards me, but towards us both, that we were the two left sitting here, left behind, while Frei lay cold in a coffin somewhere out in Tananger. He pressed his chin on the teddy bear’s head as he bit his bottom lip.
‘Why did she do that?’
‘At first she was probably simply curious about who you were. I also think that she wanted to know about Simon, what it was he was actually up to. The day after you had met each other at Café Sting, Frei came home and asked if I could get her some GHB.’
‘What was the plan?’
‘Not really a plan,’ Robert said. ‘I don’t know all of it – I didn’t want to know – but you and Frei were to drive into a police road check, high on GHB, and Simon would at least gain some breathing space. Maybe the case would even be dropped, who knows?’
‘A police road check.’ Suddenly it was there again: that bitter taste of cider in my mouth. ‘Really?’ I went on, struggling to swallow. ‘How original.’
‘Simon had sent her a text message saying that there would be a road check on Tanangervegen that evening, and asked her to make sure you drove into that road check, under the influence. She told me that when I arrived with the bottle of cider. My God,’ he groaned and put his face in his hands. ‘You’ve no idea how much I regret getting at all—’
‘Tanangervegen?’ I stopped for a moment before jerking upright. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The police road check,’ Robert answered, looking at me again. The half-smile was back. ‘It was at the end of Tanangervegen.’
‘No,’ I whispered, shaking my head. ‘No, no, no!’ I glanced up at Robert as I made an effort to restrain what had started to unfold within me. ‘You’re mistaken. It can’t have been on Tanangervegen. It—’
‘No, Thorkild.’ Robert sat, unruffled, looking at me between the ears of the stout teddy bear. ‘I’m not mistaken.’ Putting the teddy down on the floor, he approached me. ‘But you didn’t go to Tananger,’ he said, placing his hand gently on my arm. ‘Did you?’
I did not answer. My insides felt transparent and fragile. Everything had tensed, and the smallest movement was painful. This was a new type of ache – one I had not known even existed. An ache that does not go away, one that is never going to depart.
Robert was about to say something further when a knock sounded on the door. One of the liaison officers popped his head inside and said: ‘Nearly time up, boys.’
I went on sitting without moving so much as a muscle. Robert stood up and put on his jacket and scarf. ‘I think that was everything.’ He nodded to himself as he pulled up his jacket zip. ‘Don’t you agree?’ He turned to the door where the liaison officer had appeared, before his eyes turned back to me. ‘Goodbye, Thorkild. I don’t think the two of us need meet again.’
Then he left.
After the liaison officer had escorted me back to my cell, I picked up my toilet bag and towel and headed off to the gym hall. ‘How could you?’ I whispered to myself as I went through the hall past two men who were dismantling the volleyball net. ‘How could you do that to me?’ I stopped in front of one of the lockers and took out a skipping rope before moving on to the changing room and the communal showers at the opposite end.
The changing room was empty. A cloud of steam floated over the opening between the showers and changing room, and you could see puddles of water on the floor that separated the benches.
Water trickled down the stone walls and a curtain of vapour drifted up beneath the ceiling where pipes ran from the shower walls across to the other side of the room. I crossed to the door, opened it a crack and peered out. The two men in the gym hall were gone and the main light was switched off. I closed the door and dragged one of the benches with me into the shower.
As soon as the bench was in place, I turned on all the showers, setting them to the hottest setting possible. I jumped up on the bench and lobbed the rope over a thick pipe bolted to the ceiling. I looped it over twice more, then tied a noose at the other end.
I leapt down from the bench and headed across to the showers on my right, which all switched off automatically after one minute, and turned them on again. The older showers on the other side, lacking this automatic function, were still spewing out hot water that splashed on the stone floor as the veils of steam grew denser.
I scurried back to the bench, grabbed the noose with both hands and pulled it down over my head. The noise of the water pounding the floor, bombarding the rusty drains on either side of me, was deafening. The waves of steam clung to my skin, keeping the cold at bay. Condensation closed my pores and insulated the acute, amorphous pain inside me.
I used both hands to catch hold of the rope above the noose, pressing my toes against the end of the bench below me to kick it away. There you are, Thorkild, I thought, as my head was pushed forward and down on to my chest and the rope tightened around my neck. The worst is already over.
My torso twisted slowly in a circular motion while my legs kicked convulsively out into nothingness. The showers on the right were no longer spilling out water. I remember feeling annoyed that they couldn’t keep me company all the way. Suddenly, out of the corn
er of my eye, I caught sight of the wall clock in the changing room through the mist. A round metal dial with thick hands. Three minutes past five.
Why didn’t we go to Tananger that evening, Frei? Oh my God, why couldn’t we just have gone to Tananger …?
CHAPTER 40
‘She used you.’ Liz’s voice jerks me out of the fog of drowsiness I’ve talked myself into. I open my eyes at the very moment the motor on the disco ball above the dance floor finally gives up the ghost. It’s as if all of its innards have churned themselves into thousands of tiny plastic and metal fragments that are now simply drumming around inside the casing. ‘She manipulated you and wanted you to lose your job. I hate her,’ Liz sobs bitterly. ‘Even though she’s dead, even though we’ve never met, I still hate her.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I blubber, struggling to haul myself into an upright position again. ‘But it’s not your fault. We’re both like that. That’s why we choose people like Arvid and Ann-Mari, damaged, distant people who can’t ever see, who won’t ever come close. But that’s not how it should be, Liz. I knew about Frei and Simon Bergeland the whole time. Her name was in his case papers. Frei was playing a game with me, and I let her do that. Manipulation and information, don’t you see? That’s what we do, you know, people like me. Manipulate thoughts.’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘Hasn’t it dawned on you yet that your brother is an illusionist? A fucking first-class expert in smoke and mirrors, so utterly engrossed in the role that … that …’ Having lost my thread in all my gabbling, I wolf down the last of the pills on the table between me and the woman without a face. I only just manage to keep my hands steady as I run them across the table. Several of the pills and capsules clatter on to the floor or drop between my jacket and shirt as I lift them to my mouth.
‘Did you ever meet him?’ I can hear Liz struggling to grasp the conversation and steer it in a different direction. ‘Her boyfriend?’
‘No. He never turned up for interview that day. Later I heard that Internal Affairs searched for him for a while, but they never found him. Puff,’ I say, laughing. ‘Vanished into thin air.’
I Will Miss You Tomorrow Page 17