I give a brief nod of farewell to the frozen woman without a face opposite me before getting to my feet and staggering back across the dance floor. The music has stopped again. The room is totally silent, disturbed only occasionally by the asthmatic breathing of the smoke machine and the whirring of the broken disco ball on the ceiling.
I regain my balance by grabbing hold of one of the pillars that divide the dance floor from the rest of the room, and stand there for a second while I struggle to remain on my feet and strain to see through the clouds of smoke. Ultimately I glimpse the green man on the white emergency exit sign and take a deep breath before preparing to lurch towards the exit.
I try to slow down by using my free hand to take hold of the metal handle, but miss and bump my head on the door without feeling anything at all.
‘You mustn’t do it,’ I hear Liz whisper as I pick up my mobile and stand with my back against the door. ‘I can’t manage on my own, Thorkild.’
‘Don’t be afraid.’ I cough and choke until I’ve collected enough saliva in my mouth to swallow. ‘The cold metal will melt me down and then, hey presto …’ I rub my eyes in an attempt to remove the film obscuring my sight. Instead I end up letting in more soot and dirt so that tears begin to flow, though I don’t feel any pain in my cheek. ‘Then it’ll all be over. No more Thorkilds.’
I can hear Liz breathing through the receiver, heavy and irregular between the words she believes I will hear and the tears she is unable to hold back. However, this is not about us, about Liz and me. It applies only to myself, and the woman who stands waiting on the other side of the rivers.
I wheel round and lean all of my weight against the door handle. At last it gives way and opens with a creak.
Chill sea air pummels my face and tears at my lungs when I inhale. Above me I can see that a break in the weather has begun. I leave through the emergency exit, heading for the rocky shore, and stop in front of a massive boulder. My eyes scan the seascape ahead of me. ‘But I didn’t see,’ I smack my lips in an effort to taste the salt water on my tongue, ‘or hear what it was you were trying to say …’
I produce a gasping, gurgling attempt at laughter, but the sound sticks in my throat and I gag instead, over and over again, as I pick my way across the slippery stones between the emergency exit in the basement of the main building and the rocky shoreline. In front of me the waves surge forward with head-shaped tangles of seaweed sploshing and beating against the bedrock.
‘So beautiful,’ I sing as I teeter down the slick stones towards the water’s edge. My face is turned up to the sky, where I can see deep ravines in the incandescence of the moon. Rivers of silver wend their way out of these gashes, imbuing the circumference of the sky with various metallic tones, and an even fierier pattern snakes down in spiral-shaped galaxies closer to the centre.
‘Thorkild,’ Liz bleats. I can hardly hear her now. The roar of the sea swallows her voice. ‘Don’t hang up. Please. I promise I’ll be a better sister – I won’t nag and bother you any more – I …’
I’ve taken the mobile from my ear as I halt on the edge of the rocks. ‘We didn’t go to Tananger that evening,’ I mumble to the black waters in front of me. Farther out, the rivers merge into the murk, illuminating it from the inside, an intense silver-black bioluminescence. Soon I too will be reshaped and become part of this enormous energy. ‘We took another road, didn’t we, Frei? A completely different road.’
I lift my arms out at my sides and place one foot slightly in front of the other, retching again. Vomit runs down my chin and clothes, but it no longer matters, since the water will wash it away. This time the water will wash everything away.
Above me, the sky is completely open at last, and cold colours join the two points together. The wormhole is ready. Shutting my eyes, I press my lips together and force my body forward.
I meet the darkness before me with a subdued splash and roll over on to my back where I lie rocking in time to the beat of the ocean, back and forth, as I am drawn away from the rocks and into the silver rain. ‘This is the last,’ I gasp, as the salt water washes over my body and face. ‘The very last Thorkild.’
CHAPTER 41
My final day with Frei, Stavanger, 26 October 2011
Frei was leaning against the door outside Stavanger Police Headquarters when I descended from the office on the first floor that had been allocated to me. The duty officer had phoned to say I had a visitor. At first I thought it was Simon Bergeland who had finally turned up for interview, and asked the duty officer to let him in.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked when I emerged. I rolled my shirtsleeves up to my elbows as I approached her. A gentle breeze rippled over the hairs on my forearm and rustled through the trees outside.
Frei was wearing a short skirt with a black and white pattern, black trainers and a white, loose-fitting, silky sweater with long sleeves. Her eyes were heavily made up and she had something black, resembling a dog’s chain, around her neck. ‘Shall we go for a drive?’ Her lips had thin streaks of deeper red where they met. I was aware of the smell of alcohol on her breath as she moved in towards me and gave me a brief, clumsy hug.
‘I can’t,’ I answered when she withdrew again. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. ‘I’m waiting for somebody.’
Frei tried to smile, all the time struggling to stay on her feet. ‘He’s not coming,’ she said, laughing, and leaned against me so heavily that I felt her breasts press against my chest.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know everything,’ she replied, still laughing, and slipped away from me again. She retreated a couple of paces and used one of the lampposts for support as she cradled a bottle of cider.
‘I don’t doubt it.’ I stood gazing at her, aware of the fragrance of her shampoo and perfume clinging to my clothes. I just wanted to succumb to the illusion again, to hell with the consequences, and go over, lift her up and bury my face in her hair.
‘Are you coming?’
‘Stop it, Frei.’
‘Please.’
I looked at my watch. It would soon be six o’clock. The interview with Simon Bergeland was supposed to have started three hours earlier. I knew he would not appear today either, unless he was the person we were travelling to meet.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Tananger.’ Frei tossed the bottle of cider to me.
I opened the bottle and took a swig. The cider tasted sour, almost like battery acid.
‘What’s going on in Tananger?’ I asked, passing the bottle back to her.
‘Wait and see.’
I glanced at my watch again before finally answering: ‘OK, then. But I’ll drive.’
I rang the doorbell and the duty officer let me in again. I raced up to the office, cleared my belongings and packed away the AV equipment I had fixed up. I tried to call Simon Bergeland’s number one last time, but his phone was still switched off.
Frei was standing beside the car, smoking. Getting in without any exchange of words, I reversed out of the car park and drove to Lagårdsveien.
‘Am I beautiful?’ she asked abruptly without meeting my eye. Her head was turned towards the side window and the lights of the city beyond.
‘Extremely. What’s in Tananger?’
‘You know nothing about me,’ she went on without heeding the question.
‘Who are you, then?’ Following Frei’s directions, I turned on to the first roundabout that took us over to the main road and on out of the city on route E39. A strange prickling sensation had erupted in my chest, and was spreading up through my shoulders and face.
‘I could have been yours,’ she said without warning as she turned to face me. Her eyes were dark, almost as if she was scared. ‘Really.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I replied, attempting a smile, but it was as though something was tugging at the muscles beneath my skin, holding it back.
‘Why not?’ Frei took the bottle of cider from the centre cons
ole and nervously began to rotate it in her hands. Opening it, she took a mouthful, replaced the cap and continued to spin it between her hands. ‘You just said you thought I was beautiful.’
‘Extremely beautiful,’ I added.
‘Well?’
‘This is just a game, isn’t it?’ The streetlights had already come on, and the rain clouds were dispersing above us.
Frei stopped twirling the bottle and let her gaze drift back out through the side window. ‘What if there were just the two of us?’ she whispered into the glass.
‘Are there more of us?’ I turned theatrically towards the empty rear seat. ‘Hmm, nobody here, you know. Do you see anyone on your side?’
I wanted to tell her that I knew all about her and the corrupt policeman whose career she was trying to salvage, to tell her that I was going to nail that bastard to the wall, spreadeagled, no matter how damn much she had thought to degrade herself in order to save him. But I didn’t. There was still something that restrained me. A ridiculous, naïve belief that as long as neither of us paused the game, then everything would stay true. That we hadn’t simply been thrown together by circumstances, shadows drifting across each other on a busy shopping street, but that we were two people, a man and a woman who felt a kinship.
‘Yes,’ I said in the end. ‘If there were just the two of us.’
‘Even though you know I’m not who you thought I was, that I’m constantly lying, that I use—’
‘Yes,’ I broke in. ‘Every time, if you absolutely have to know.’
I could see her smile through the side window as she continued to roll the bottle of cider between her hands. ‘Thanks.’
‘Thanks?’ All of a sudden I felt very hot – my chest, my neck and my face. Gentle, teasing warmth that tickled its way to my stomach and made me want to laugh. Endlessly. ‘What do you mean by thanks?’
‘I just wanted to know.’
‘But aren’t there only the two of us, then?’
Frei straightened up and finally looked straight at me. She pointed at my chest. ‘One,’ she said before directing the finger at herself, ‘two.’
‘Ah, very funny,’ I answered, laughing, as my belly filled with more soft, tingling heat. My hands tensed on the steering wheel. The cool leather increased the tingling in my hands, making it more acute, as if something beneath my skin was trying to force its way through and out.
‘Wow.’ She sat watching me with her mouth half-open.
‘What?’ My grip on the steering wheel became harder. It felt as if my body would glide up from the car seat, that we were two astronauts on a training flight on board some sort of NASA spaceship in parabolic orbit.
‘Did we just spend a moment together?’
‘Did we?’
‘I think so,’ she said, laughing.
‘By the way, tell me when we need to turn off. I—’
‘You’ve already driven past,’ Frei said, ‘a long time ago.’
‘Fuck,’ I muttered, trying to look for an exit road or another roundabout, all the while struggling to concentrate on sitting still in my seat. ‘Should I turn round?’
‘No.’
‘Weren’t we going to Tananger?’
‘Don’t turn.’ Frei rested her head on my shoulder. ‘I want to drive on.’
Above me I caught sight of a dark hole in the steadily contracting rainclouds. A sharp light had appeared up there. Not the steel-blue light from the sky that you are used to at this time of year, but something warmer, more earthly, as if I was staring at a glowing silver disc. Eventually, as the clouds went on receding, I could see that it was the moon.
I was about to tell Frei that it appeared to be bleeding, that thick streams of silvery lava were flowing out of its glittering surface, but before I managed to say anything there was a hollow thud from somewhere underneath me. The next minute I was flying, hovering over the driver’s seat with my hands clutching the steering wheel. Frei also took off, and I could see her terrified face turn away from mine, and her hair rise to form a halo around her head. Right after that, a loud bang sounded and I could feel my head thrown forward to smash into the wheel.
The last thing I remembered was the bitter, metallic taste of cider in my mouth. It was still there when I woke the next day and they told me that Frei was dead.
TUESDAY
CHAPTER 42
This certainly isn’t a new Thorkild. That is the first thing to strike me when I wake. Dead stars glint like cats’ eyes from the night sky above me. All around I hear the water splashing and lapping as I pitch up and down to the rhythm of the waves.
I am lying on some sort of raft made of seaweed, carrier bags, tail-ends of rope, plastic containers and other rubbish drifting around in the surf out at sea. I turn my head and can see that this raft is the wreckage of the quay torn loose from the lighthouse by the storm on my first day there.
‘My God,’ I groan before glimpsing a young bird a couple of metres away – it too seems to have settled on this island of trash as it drifts through the night. The fledgling is plump, speckled white and dark brown, with a black beak. It resembles an eagle as it sits there staring at me through its large, piercing, raptor’s eyes before turning away to draw its wings more snugly around its body and press its head down on its chest.
‘Help,’ I whisper, twisting my head towards the bird. ‘Can you help me?’ The next moment the pains stab through me – first my neck and cheek and then my belly: the throbbing internal pressure in my digestive system, heavy as an anchor, is back with a vengeance.
I turn my gaze to the sky and squeeze my eyes shut as convulsive pains shoot through my gut. When I open them again, I can see that one of the cats’ eyes has tumbled from the sky and is on its way to earth, like a falling star.
I break into howls just as the young sea eagle struggles to flap its wings.
Gradually, as the falling star approaches, filling the heavens with light, the bird gives up and wraps its wings around its body, lifts its head and opens its beak, either in a final attempt to defend itself or because it thinks it is about to be fed.
I make a move to raise my hands and shield myself from the strong light, but don’t have the strength. One hand is caught in something. I turn my head aside to discover what it is and catch sight of a grey hand protruding from the forest of seaweed and bladderwrack beside me. The white, stiff fingers are closed around mine, as if in a welcoming handshake.
I touch the hand sticking out of the tangle of weeds with my fingertips. The surface feels cold and smooth, like a tailor’s dummy. I pull my hand back and try to free the other one from its clutches when all at once I glimpse the falling star again.
It is poised above the surface of the sea like a fire-breathing dragon, sending foaming surf in all directions, and making the whole island of rubbish rock heavily from side to side. I grab the bottom layer with my free hand and yelp in fright and pain as scraps of plastic, foam and ice-cold ocean spray rain down on us.
Soon there’s a splash not far from where I am lying, and I can see a black figure carving its way through the water towards me. The baby eagle has rolled itself into a ball of brown and white feathers with only the beak visible. The rest of its head is buried somewhere inside. ‘Let go,’ a voice yells at me. A man has appeared by my side.
I shake my head and cling more tightly to the floating debris and the ice-cold human hand.
‘Let go,’ the man repeats, pointing at a metal stretcher lying in the water beside him. ‘I can’t get you on board the helicopter if you don’t let go.’
I turn my gaze back to the eaglet. I can make out one of its eyes under the feathers, before it hisses at me. Then its head vanishes back under its wing at the same time as the man in black at my side starts to force my fingers open, one by one, from whatever I am clutching under the surface of the sea.
‘Let go! Do you hear? You have to let go, or I can’t get you up in the basket!’
Eventually I capitulate – I don’t have any en
ergy left, and the man begins to drag me by the shoulders, away from the island of waste. At my back, an entire human body emerges from the seaweed I’m towing in my wake through the flotsam towards the metal stretcher.
‘You go up first,’ he says calmly, and I nod a response. ‘Then I’ll take him next. OK?’
In the end I let go, and my rescuer rolls me over into the basket before attaching the harness around my body. He waves to the light and remains behind with the dead body. The very next minute, I feel myself being hoisted out of the water and towards the light, while my teeth chatter and my lips quiver.
As they haul the basket into the helicopter, I also catch one final glimpse of the baby eagle down there on the quay debris wrested from the lighthouse a few days earlier. It is on its feet now, flapping its wings as foam and seawater whipped up by the rotor blades cascade over it.
‘Hey! Can you hear me?’ a member of the helicopter crew asks, as he wraps me in blankets and aluminium foil and the basket is winched down again.
I try my hardest to say something but realise that I can’t manage to gather enough air in my lungs. The anaesthetist touches my cheeks with his hands. Only now do I notice how cold I am. I can barely feel the heat of his hands through my own skin. ‘Hey, you can’t close your eyes now,’ he adds as his fingers pinch and knead my face.
The roar of the helicopter surrounds us, drowns us in the pulse of the rotor blades. Soon the winch comes up again. The body in the basket is removed and set down beside me. It is wrapped in blankets and foil by the time my rescuer comes on board, slamming the door behind him.
‘Have you seen this?’ the crewman unfastens the strap on his helmet and puts it aside.
‘What?’ the anaesthetist turns to face him. ‘Is it one of the missing policemen?’
‘No,’ my rescuer replies coolly. ‘I guarantee you it’s not.’
I Will Miss You Tomorrow Page 18