A Modern Family

by Helga Flatland

  I’ve been walking around all summer long with an unspoken sense that autumn will dawn, wielding its power to normalise, that the chaos that has reigned all spring and summer will be forced to yield to routine and fixed frameworks. But then the sun came out instead, the temperature of the water rose, and I was gradually overwhelmed by the sense that everything is disjointed and somehow out of reach.

  Olaf, the children and I spent more than three weeks of the summer holidays at the cabin in Lillesand. At first it seemed far too long, as if the summer would never end. It was just the four of us all summer, something we’ve never tried before, and it hit me towards the end of the holiday that we’ve never spent three weeks straight all alone, and that what makes us a unit in everyday life – Agnar, Hedda, Olaf and me – what makes us a family is entirely dependent on the gaze of others, their interference and input, ensuring we function normally, ensuring we function at all.

  Ellen and Simen were supposed to come down for the third week but they jetted off to Croatia instead, hoping to find some summer, as Ellen put it in her text message to me two days before they had been intending to arrive. Up until that point they’d been our lifebuoys, the thing that was preventing my new-found desperation over the virtually airtight company of my own little family from revealing itself in some way other than through the long interval-training runs around the island.

  Agnar wanted to do nothing but lounge around indoors and play computer games on Håkon’s old Gameboy for the entire holiday. He was moody and grumpy and pimply, refused to use the cream I’d bought to help prevent the angry breakouts that had recently flared up on his face and back. It infuriated me. Use the cream in the morning and at night, I shouted at the end of the second week after receiving Ellen’s message. It was a rainy morning and we were all indoors, all on top of one another in the cabin without anything to do, and though I had no idea where my wrath emerged from, his spots were suddenly intolerable to me. You’re crazy, Agnar shouted back at me. You’re the one who’s crazy, choosing to look the way you do, I said, and swallowed the dawning realisation of what I’d actually just said to my insecure fourteen-year-old son. Olaf slammed the front door demonstrably, taking Hedda out to look for crabs along the sandy stretch of coastline, and I ran around the island as my conscience gnawed at me, promising to pull myself together, swearing I wouldn’t ruin the holiday for the children; it’s not their fault it’s raining or that nobody else is coming to join us here. But I felt furious the following day when Hedda wanted to go out in her new trainers rather than her boots, and Olaf allowed her to so that she’d experience wet feet for herself and understand the discomfort that comes with it. Those shoes cost four hundred kroner, I shouted at Olaf, thumping the wall in front of Hedda and Agnar, breaking our rule not to argue in front of the children for what was probably the fiftieth time in the space of two weeks. I ran after Hedda, who was on her way out into the rain, picking her up and carrying her inside as she wailed and writhed in my arms, pulling off her shoes, and she ran out again in her stockinged feet. Is she uncomfortable enough for you now? I screamed at Olaf.

  It wasn’t until the very end of the holiday, when everyone knew there were only three or four days left, that the mood lifted. All of a sudden Agnar wanted to go out fishing, like he always used to do with Dad, Olaf brought me coffee in bed, and Hedda wasn’t endlessly clingy and whiny. Luckily that’s the kind of thing you remember about a holiday or an event, I said to Olaf on the way home in the car, the average of the best and most recent parts of the whole thing put together, I’d read it somewhere, couldn’t remember where, until Olaf replied that he wasn’t so sure if Kahneman’s theories on memory could really be applied to a family holiday in Lillesand.

  I bump into Håkon quite by chance on the way home from work one day. I’d popped into the electronics store on Carl Berners plass to buy a new belt for the washing machine, which had broken after Olaf had stuffed too many bedsheets and towels into it the previous afternoon. He blamed me afterwards for leaving them in the machine for a whole week; they’d grown mildew, he said, which was the reason he’d had to wash them again to begin with. I wasn’t sure that I agreed it was my fault when he was the one who had stuffed the damp, heavy sheets back in along with all of his exercise gear, but I told him I’d fix it. He looked almost disappointed when I didn’t launch into further discussion about it, as we’ve discussed and quarrelled about almost everything over the past few weeks, months, even. I need my exercise gear for the competition on Wednesday, he said. You’d best call the engineer. It’s half past eleven, Olaf, I’ll call them in the morning. He won’t be able to come out before Wednesday, and then it’ll be too late, you know that as well as I do. It’s your own fault for putting off doing your washing until you’ve nothing clean left to wear. I’m sorry, I do all of our laundry every single week, and on the one occasion that you do it, you leave it all in the machine and ruin it. What the hell do you want me to do about it now? I eventually shouted. I want you to get your act together.

  The combination of exhaustion and anger is impossible, I’m trapped in this new pattern with Olaf every evening. Even though I do my best to avoid it, we always end up in the same place, just as we did yesterday. I had tried withdrawing from the situation and our discussion. Don’t walk off in the middle of a conversation, Olaf said, you know how much I hate that, you don’t need to get like that over a washing machine. The wilfulness, the unrecognisable self-righteousness, the situation brought a smile to my lips. I’ll fix the machine, I said quietly, knowing it provoked him all the more to see me acting so calmly when he was so cross. I closed the door behind me quietly.

  Fortunately, he didn’t follow me as he might have done previously, and it took all my strength to pull the machine out into the middle of the room. I stood there for a moment feeling utterly perplexed before realising that there was a cover on the back of the machine; I found a screwdriver and carefully loosened all of the screws, popping them into a little bag as I’d learned from Dad when he’d shown Ellen and me how to change the tyres of a car, then lifted the cover. I’d imagined a chaotic mess of incomprehensible parts, but I was surprised by the simple logic: drive shaft, belt, a small motor and drum. The belt had split in two and I fished it out from the bottom of the machine, stuffing it in my dressing gown pocket and going to bed in the guest room, leaving the washing machine door gaping wide for Olaf to see when he went into the bathroom the following morning.

  Håkon emerges from the greengrocer’s just as I’m crossing at the roundabout. It strikes me that I’ve never bumped into him or Ellen by chance out and about before. He looks down at his phone then down Finnmarksgata, looking for the bus, maybe, and he doesn’t see me until I touch his arm and say his name. I raise an arm, ready to give him a hug, but the motion halts somewhere between us, Håkon fails to meet me halfway. But he smiles.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve just picked up a belt for the washing machine. It was the only shop that had the right kind in stock,’ I add, nodding at my bag.

  His forehead is sweaty, his hair has grown a little long, he’s shaved his beard and he looks younger than he did when I last saw him. I don’t remember when that was, early August, maybe.

  He nods, doesn’t ask about the belt.

  ‘What about you?’ I ask.

  ‘I was just getting some vegetables, I’m on my way over to a friend’s for dinner.’

  ‘A friend?’ I repeat back at him, smiling. I know most of Håkon’s friends, at least by name, and he tends to refer to people that way, regardless of who he’s speaking to.

  ‘A friend,’ he repeats. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I just told you, I was buying a belt for the washing machine, Olaf broke it yesterday,’ I tell him. I feel a brief stab of guilt, but it’s absorbed by the heavy atmosphere that lingers between Håkon and me, the staccato conversation. ‘It’s ages since I saw you last,’ I say, my tone inquisitive.

  ‘It’s
ages since I saw you last too,’ he replies with a low chuckle. ‘No, but things have been busy since then.’

  He turns his head, and I follow his gaze to see a red bus coming to a halt at the crossing by Helgesens gate.

  ‘But things are well?’ I ask with slightly less patience, emboldened by the sight of the approaching bus.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes, are you well, is everything good with you? Have you spoken to Ellen, by the way?’

  ‘There’s a lot going on, like I said, but things are good,’ he says, fiddling with his earlobe. ‘How are things with Agnar?’

  ‘Agnar spends most of his time these days feeling angry, it’s pretty frustrating,’ I reply.

  ‘Aha,’ Håkon says, ‘maybe I should take him to the cinema or something one day.’

  The bus approaches the roundabout and Håkon half turns away from me.

  ‘It was good to see you,’ I say, on the brink of welling up. ‘Could you pop by one day, maybe? Or we could go out for a beer, invite Ellen along too?’

  ‘Sure, of course, we’ll do it, call me,’ he says, pointing at the bus. ‘But I need to run.’

  I go to the greengrocer’s too, plucking Turkish yoghurt and vegetables and spices from the shelves and placing them in my basket; I want to make tikka masala for Agnar, but I change my mind as I stand in the queue, it’s too hot to be eating Indian food, and so I put everything back; I’ve spent what must be half an hour buying nothing at all. Olaf can make dinner. I make my way home and install the new belt in the machine, and it strikes me that it’s been three months and seventeen days since I’ve felt the satisfaction I feel when I turn on the machine to find that it actually works.

  Uplifted by my triumph over the washing machine, I call Ellen. It goes straight through to answerphone and my courage gives way when I hear her voice. I don’t leave a message, don’t know what to say, don’t remember why I’m ringing. The notion that I need a reason to call her is a new one. Previously it was an automatic thing, something I did at least three times a week without thinking, while making dinner, on my way back from the office or on my way to nursery. Now I can’t even recall what we talked about, the idea of ringing her just to tell her about the washing machine or an argument I had with Olaf seems silly, somehow. I get the feeling she’s making a point about something, I don’t know what, but something aimed at me, and the thought leaves me despondent.

  The house is quiet. I feel a momentary panic when it occurs to me that I’ve forgotten to collect Hedda, but then I remember she was due to go to a friend’s house after nursery. I set the alarm on my phone to remind me to pick her up when the afternoon of kids’ TV programmes comes to an end; I don’t trust myself or my memory, I feel like I’m forgetting everything I need to do, everything I am doing. Agnar should have been home from school an hour ago; he hasn’t messaged to say he’s doing anything else, or he hasn’t messaged me, at least, and I feel resigned to it, as though I can’t be bothered to nag him any more. I’ve made half-hearted threats about consequences I know I’ve got no power to see through, and Agnar can read me like a book, so much so that he doesn’t even go to the effort of objecting. A few days ago, he even told me he had made an agreement with Olaf that he could do as he liked as long as he made time for his homework and other obligations. I couldn’t face the discussion with Olaf that I knew would unfold, a labyrinth of accusations.

  I change into my exercise gear and then spend half an hour sitting on the bed and staring at the wall. I can’t summon the motivation required to get up until I receive a message from Olaf telling me he’s on his way home and will pick up some food en route.

  Olaf and I bought the house in Sagene when Agnar was born. It was between the one we chose and another in Ekeberg, which was cheaper and larger, but Olaf felt it was more important to live close to Mum and Dad in Tåsen. Just imagine living in such easy walking distance, especially when the children are big enough to go there themselves. I agreed with him. I grew up with my grandparents’ house as a second home, remember how liberating it was to walk there by myself after school, to be an only child for a day, no Ellen or screaming Håkon to steal the limelight. I feel like Grandma and Grandad were always at home, that it was always a good time for me to pop in – I can only remember one occasion when Grandma told me it wasn’t convenient, when I called her one morning and asked if I could come around after school and stay for the night. My cousin had beaten me to it. Even though Grandma continued to dye her hair dark right up until three days before she died, thereby distinguishing herself from the grey-haired grandmothers in fairy tales, they were absolutely typical grandparents in every other way. Always at home, always all ears, and with a mantlepiece bustling with trolls and pixies and ornaments and drawings, an apparently random amalgamation of bits and pieces gifted by five grandchildren with varying degrees of talent. I never considered them independent individuals until I became an adult and had my own children; they simply fulfilled a function in my life. It was even difficult for me to comprehend them fulfilling that same role for Ellen until she spoke at Grandad’s funeral and described my upbringing and escapes and childish grief as her own.

  I wonder what Agnar and Hedda will think about their grandparents when they become adults, what they might come to represent in their eyes.

  I run to Mum and Dad’s house. My legs don’t just take me there of their own accord, I don’t suddenly find myself standing in a meaningful location without realising quite how I got there, as I’ve read with irritation in so many novels. I make my way there with purpose, fully aware that Mum is in Sicily with a friend. She had sent a photograph of the horizon over the sea, which could have been anywhere, along with a poem by Tomas Tranströmer that I couldn’t be bothered even to attempt to interpret. Mum often sends things like that, usually with a blatantly obvious message to be found when one reads between the lines. I’m clearly not as receptive to artistic overtures of this nature in the same way as Håkon and Ellen, who refer to the subtexts of poems she sends as if these things were obvious.

  I haven’t been home since we got back from Italy in April. I feel almost disappointingly detached as I open the gate and make my way up the driveway; I might as well have been here yesterday. I still carry keys to the house on my own keyring and I unlock the front door. The alarm goes off – Mum has clearly installed a new, more up-to-date system. I try keying in the old code, Grandma’s birthday: 0405. Code invalid, the display flashes back. I try once more. Code invalid. Eventually the alarm starts, a piercing wail, and the noise awakens an intense and familiar sense of discomfort within me, a reminder of when I was young and my greatest fear involved setting it off. The sound of the alarm is amplified in such a way that any potential burglars become so stressed by the din, it paralyses them, in the same way elk are paralysed by car headlights. I assume the security company will call Mum so I try to beat them to it, pull her number up on my phone, breaking a rule I’ve set myself and which I’ve managed to stick to over the past seven weeks. She doesn’t pick up, so instead I try ringing the number on a sticker beside the box by the front door, but as I key it in, the alarm stops. A message comes in, it’s been sent to Håkon, Ellen and me and it’s from Mum: Is one of you at the house, reply quickly. I reply with a yes, initially just to Mum, and after that to the group, exposing myself in every possible way. Mum simply writes: OK, the new code is Håkon’s birthday. Neither Håkon nor Ellen respond.

  All houses have a smell. The sunlight and warmth intensify the characteristic smell of the place, the smell of Mum and Dad, books, dust, coffee, detergent and woodwork. There is no doubting the fact that the rooms still smell of Dad, but perhaps it’s the house that’s imparted its smell to him and not the other way around, since he hasn’t been here for several months now, at least as far as I know. He hasn’t taken anything of any significance with him, as Mum also assured me on the phone just after he’d moved out. His chair is just across from Mum’s at the little table, but the reading lamp that had once b
een placed beside it, the one he received as a sixtieth birthday gift from Olaf and me, has gone. I run a finger along the spines of the books on the shelves in a pattern, just as I’ve done since I was young, nothing amiss there. I go back into the hallway and see now that there’s an empty space where Dad’s slippers were once lined up beside Mum’s; go into the kitchen, help myself to a a glass of water; it’s hard to swallow. The house is so similar and yet so different, as if someone has simply shifted all of the furniture or walls or rugs a centimetre one way or the other.

  I go upstairs, the fourth step creaking predictably beneath me. Mum and Dad’s bedroom door is closed. I don’t open it, don’t know what it is that I don’t want to see there. I go into the bathroom. Dad has retrieved all of his toiletries from his shelf. A hairbrush still sits on my shelf, the same one I’ve had since I was young, plus a few of the old pieces of jewellery I made with hemp cord and painted wooden beads that Mum hasn’t had the heart to throw away – though perhaps she simply likes the fact that the house is still filled with our things, since some of Ellen and Håkon’s old belongings are still here, too. I go into my room, where Agnar usually sleeps when he’s here. Was here. The old poster of Madonna from the ‘Who’s That Girl’ tour is hanging above the desk, but someone has taken down the poster of the Eurythmics that used to hang by the mirror – Annie Lennox stares at me intently from the desk where she now lies. I sit on the bed, rest my head against the wall behind me and listen to the silence from Ellen’s room across the hall. I remember the way we’d both sit with our own stereo systems as close as it was possible for them to be through the uninsulated walls, first to drown out the sound of one another, and then to play music in synchronisation, when Ellen started copying all the music I liked. Three, two, one, go! I’d shout through the wall. Ellen was always slightly too slow when it came to pressing play, so I’d wait an extra moment before pressing the button on my own player – then Madonna, Ellen and I would sing ‘Express Yourself’ in sync, each in our own rooms.