A Modern Family

by Helga Flatland

  I’m running fifteen minutes late because Olaf was delayed in coming home from the gym; he gets home late more often now than he used to, usually without letting me know in advance. We sat and discussed the election after we were done, he said, throwing out his arms apologetically when he finally arrived home in his hat and cycle shorts. Good to see you’ve got your priorities straight, I said, pointing at Hedda, who was sitting at the top of the stairs and watching us through the banisters. I had been trying to get her to go to sleep for two hours; she’d come down to the living room what must have been ten times already and I’d gone back upstairs with her to sing and stroke her hair at least as many times. The last time I’d heard her footsteps on the floor, the door opening, her light tread on the first step, I’d called out to tell her that she wasn’t allowed to come downstairs again. Go to bed, Hedda, I said. No, she said, stubbornly sitting at the top of the stairs, not angry or upset, but simply determined. I’ve often felt curious about her decision-making processes, what accounts for the dramatically clear decisions she formulates in her young mind. Well, you’ll just have to sit there, I eventually conceded, you can’t come down here again tonight. And so Hedda sat there. I didn’t feel the slightest hint of guilt about leaving Olaf to deal with the issue – quite the opposite, in fact.

  Ellen and Håkon are each sitting with a beer when I arrive, discussing the election, as predicted. I hug them both in turn, missing them intensely the moment I smell them, and it takes a huge amount of effort not to burst into tears. It would have made the situation unbearable all round, though especially for Håkon, who’s had a tendency to cry out of sympathy for anyone who happens to be upset ever since he was a boy, unable to stop himself, a fact he finds embarrassing to this day. I smile behind my scarf.

  ‘Are you talking about the election?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, and the fact that Håkon has finally got what he wanted all along,’ Ellen says.

  They both laugh.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘Got what you wanted?’

  ‘Trump as President,’ Ellen says.

  ‘Is that really how you feel?’ I ask.

  ‘Obviously not,’ Håkon says. ‘I feel the same way I’ve always felt about it.’

  I try to remember how Håkon has always felt about it, but that chops and changes year in and year out, if not by the month, and I can’t keep up.

  ‘Which is…?’ I enquire, smiling.

  ‘Firstly, it’s crazy that so many people should have any kind of opinion on the results of an election in another country, it’s only because it’s the US. Secondly, I couldn’t give a shit about anyone who isn’t Sanders. He was the only interesting candidate, and he was a symptom of something greater too, which is what they’re now saying about Trump. But Hillary was still a better alternative,’ he says.

  I wonder if this is an opinion he’s formed for himself; it resembles everything else I’ve read on the subject, and I nod even though I’m not sure I agree. My views are constantly shifting in line with whatever I read, whichever article most recently makes the best point. Håkon has refuted me on many an occasion, you said something totally different yesterday, he might say, you always agree with the last person you heard. Occasionally I’ve pointed out that his opinions also change every time we see one another, for the most part, but he always rattles off an endless list of arguments to explain the nuances in his opinions that I’ve failed to understand, before asserting that his opinions haven’t changed, they’ve just adjusted to encompass new information.

  ‘Why do you use Donald’s surname and Clinton’s first name?’ Ellen asks.

  Håkon laughs.

  ‘Sorry. I should have learned my lesson after last time,’ he says.

  Last time, I think to myself. It hadn’t struck me that Ellen and Håkon might have been in touch with one another without including me, and it scares me slightly. Given that neither of them has made any special effort to get in touch with me, I’d automatically assumed that it was communication between the three of us that had been left in tatters.

  I sit and listen for any further indications that they’ve kept in touch beyond their effortless tone, their expressions and easy laughter, all a far cry from the awkward silence I’d expected to encounter. I’d believed that it would force us to engage in a conversation about us and everything that’s happened, why we had distanced ourselves from one another almost as if on command.

  I take advantage of a brief pause when a silence of the kind I’d anticipated finally arises. ‘It’s ages since I’ve seen you both,’ I say after an hour of small talk, strikingly superficial considering our usual ease in one another’s company.

  Håkon takes a sip of his beer. Ellen looks at me, waiting for me to elaborate. I don’t know how to continue, can’t find the words to describe everything I’ve been thinking about over the past few months, the way everything has unravelled. Neither of them does anything to help me. I take a deep breath.

  ‘What’s actually happened here?’ I ask, and my fear of losing them, losing my grip, losing everything, grabs hold of me, I feel the need to swallow.

  Ellen’s smile finally fades, the same smile she’s worn since I arrived. She looks away and runs a hand through her hair, lets it rest by her ear, fiddles with her earring. Håkon seems uncomfortable, he looks down at his glass.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ellen asks.

  I don’t know what she means. I’d expected that she would be more forthright about everything, as she always is, that she’d take over the conversation almost as soon as I’d initiated it, that she’d be confrontational or upset, that she’d play out all of the feelings pent up inside me, that she’d put the chaos into words. Had I not known her better, she would have appeared perfectly unmoved – though Ellen is never really unmoved, and it’s that which exposes her. She’s putting it on, and I feel emboldened.

  ‘I just think it’s strange that we have so little contact all of a sudden,’ I say.

  As usual I expect nothing from Håkon, and I become aware that it’s Ellen I’m confronting in reality, Ellen who I blame, that Håkon is too young to understand or take responsibility for anything, but I check myself, look over at him, the thirty-year-old child with the heart condition. He deserves no more sympathy than the rest of us.

  ‘Why are you keeping your distance?’ I ask him.

  ‘I’m not keeping my distance,’ Håkon says. ‘What are you on about? You’re the one who never gets in touch any more.’

  My desperation and anxiety manifest themselves in a flash of anger.

  ‘Exactly!’ I reply, my voice loud this time. ‘See what happens when I stop getting in touch? Everything goes quiet. What does that tell you, Håkon? Hmm? You sit around waiting to hear from people, waiting to be asked to dinner, waiting for everyone to do everything for you.’

  ‘Come on Liv, you need to calm down,’ Ellen says.

  ‘It’s not a case of me calming down, it’s a case of you two realising that what I’m saying is true!’

  ‘What is it you want us to realise?’ Ellen asks, looking genuinely curious.

  ‘The fact that you’ve left me with all the responsibility, as usual. For everything. It shouldn’t simply be a given that I take care of things, but I do anyway, even now, and you’re sitting here as if nothing’s happened,’ I reply, when really I want to shout: Aren’t you both as scared of losing me as I am of losing you?

  ‘I don’t think that anything goes without saying, and what you’re saying isn’t even true – I often get in touch,’ Ellen says.

  ‘You get in touch, sure, but you never take any responsibility, never, you never have, you’re never the one to suggest that the three of us meet up, you’ve never been the one to invite us all to dinner – neither of you do – and now you’re leaving it to me to take responsibility for this, too,’ I cry, almost shouting now.

  ‘Responsibility for what?’ Håkon asks.

  ‘For this entire situation. You just disappear and expect me
to sort things out, without either of you having to figure out what’s going on with Mum and Dad or get your head around the chaos they’ve created. The fact that they’re destroying everything we are, everything we’ve ever been, trampling onwards without looking back. And nobody seems to want to acknowledge the fact that we’ve been living a lie, nobody seems concerned about it in the slightest,’ I shout despairingly, aware that I’m waving my arms now and again, almost uncontrollably.

  Both look dumbfounded, and there’s a brief pause.

  ‘We haven’t been living a lie, Liv. Even though Mum and Dad have decided to get divorced, we’re still us, we’re still sitting here, the three of us,’ Ellen says. ‘And actually, I have a fair bit of contact with Mum and Dad, I do keep in touch with them, perhaps more than you do, as far as I hear,’ Ellen says.

  It appears everyone has had more contact with each another than I have with any of them. It becomes impossible for me to reply, the patterns are so unfamiliar, the roles reversed.

  ‘Plus, this is a situation they’ve created for themselves,’ Ellen replies. ‘There’s nothing you can do, Liv. Mum and Dad need to take responsibility for their own choices, and to be quite honest, Mum in particular seems confident about the divorce, she’s moving on,’ Ellen continues with a knowing look.

  ‘What other choices has she made? How exactly is she moving on?’ I ask, looking from Ellen to Håkon and back to Ellen again. I need to swallow.

  ‘With this new chap … what’s his name again? Morten?’ Ellen asks, looking at Håkon.

  Håkon nods. The child within me comes up against my mature common sense, it triumphs, and I find myself almost unable to draw breath. How come Ellen and Håkon both know about this? Why has Mum chosen to tell them and not me?

  ‘I’m sorry, God, I thought you knew,’ Ellen says when she registers my reaction.

  ‘They’re not together together,’ Håkon says, trying to smooth things over.

  ‘They’re just friends,’ Ellen says laughing, imitating Grandma in an attempt to make light of the situation, to lift the mood, but neither Håkon nor I are laughing.

  The wind has been knocked out of me. I realise that I’ve been certain that things would sort themselves out, that this was a crisis between them that would ultimately pass, that everything would blow over.

  I think about Olaf, sitting at home, and I wonder if he’s managed to put Hedda to bed. Then I picture Dad sitting alone in his flat. I can’t seem to gather my thoughts.

  I sit in a bar down in Grünerløkka after bidding Håkon and Ellen farewell. I call Kjersti, a friend of mine who has just divorced her husband, one of only a few friends I’ve been in touch with over the past few weeks. I haven’t told anyone else about the divorce, haven’t been able to face the prospect of being confronted by my own fears or the cracks that have formed as a result, and anyway, I’ve been convinced that this was a temporary state of affairs.

  I tell Kjersti that Mum has a new partner, even though Håkon explained after a while that Mum didn’t view him that way at all, that actually she had her doubts after things had moved so quickly. I receive no sympathy from Kjersti, who asks me to stop being so egotistical, telling me I ought to feel happy for Mum, grow up, she says. I play along while silently writing off everything she says as her own way of justifying the decisions she’s made.

  I don’t have any desire to go home, so I order myself another beer. I never got the chance to say anything else I’d planned to bring up with Ellen and Håkon. We’re not the ones getting divorced, I’d imagined myself saying to them, we need to stick together. I’d pictured myself comforting them, reassuring them, putting things into perspective for them. But as it turned out, they were the ones to put things into perspective for me: I’m the one who’s overreacting, and I’ve laboured under the misapprehension that both Håkon and Ellen must feel the same way, that we must have the same experience of the situation, that their foundation has been shattered just like my own, but it’s just you, I think to myself, it’s just you who was stupid enough to build your life on the illusion of something real, while Ellen and Håkon saw through them both long ago. I drink quickly to stifle my shame.

  A man approaches me and asks if he can sit beside me at the bar. I gesture to the seat beside me, in spite of the fact that there are any number of free tables behind us. He orders a beer, checks his phone, asks how my day has been. I start laughing. He nods in agreement.

  ‘Yep, it’s absurd, the whole thing,’ he says, picking up his phone, a newspaper article on the election glowing in my direction.

  ‘What’s absurd is how much we care about a US election,’ I say, my mind filled with a comforting rush.

  I repeat a few of Håkon’s arguments, he disagrees. We sit and discuss things for a while, and it takes half an hour and another beer before I realise that I’m ingratiating myself, seeking out something in him. I wonder if I ought to just let everything go to ruin, if I should give up too. But I have children, I tell him as we stand outside the bar, one hour and several beers later, sharing a cigarette. He tells me he’s not been trying to pick me up, that he’s actually happily married, but he’s enjoyed our conversation, he says. I can’t bring myself to even feel embarrassed about the misunderstanding, instead simply laughing and repeating his words back at him: happily married. He nods. I thank him for the cigarette, pull up the zip of my coat and walk all the way home before lying down on the sofa and falling asleep.

  Agnar wakes me, seemingly annoyed.

  ‘Why are you lying here?’ he asks.

  My head is aching, my mouth is dry, the low November sun stings my eyes through the window while revealing a grey film of dust and dirt on the outside of the glass.

  ‘What’s the time?’ I ask him.

  ‘Almost ten,’ Agnar says.

  Olaf must have got up with Hedda without me having heard them. I wonder if Hedda is quieter when she’s alone with Olaf, or if I’ve slept abnormally deeply here on the sofa, which is right next door to the kitchen.

  My working hours are flexible, and though it’s a rare occurrence, I do occasionally work from home in the mornings; I convince myself that this is the reason Olaf didn’t wake me, an act of consideration rather than one of illustrative neglect.

  ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ I ask Agnar.

  ‘It’s Thursday,’ he replies brusquely, before turning to make his way into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ I say, and see that he’s wearing his sports kit. ‘How’s training going?’ I ask, feeling so sick that I have to suppress the impulse to throw up then and there, the end of my sentence disappearing with the effort required to do so, and Agnar’s expression hardens.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he says, slamming the kitchen door behind him.

  For the first time in my life, I send a message to my manager telling a lie. I write that I’m at home with Hedda, who’s unwell, sending it before I have a chance to reconsider, a cold fear creeping over me as I imagine all the possibilities – that someone might pass by the nursery and see her playing, healthy and happy in the sandpit just by the fence, or that they might bump into Olaf and Hedda on the way home. I consider picking her up, but remember that they’re making Christmas cards today, something Hedda has been talking about and eagerly anticipating since yesterday.

  I hear Agnar slam the front door as I step into the shower, and I stand on my tiptoes to catch a glimpse of him through the high window above the bathtub. I can just see him disappearing behind the hedge. He’s fading away from me, I no longer have a sense of him the way I used to. I shiver under the cold jet of water as it hits my breasts and stomach, force myself to stand under it until it comes up to temperature. I should have gone after Agnar and spoken to him before he left. What’s he thinking now, my little man? I don’t know what I should have said to him, how to speak to him; nowadays he’s too old for me to lie to but too young to understand. I don’t know any in between.

  A year ago, I found myself standing in hi
s doorway and watching him sleep, and I reflected on the incredible fact that he was lying there dreaming dreams of his own. I pondered everything his growing body accommodated, his experience and knowledge, all independent of me, all beyond my control. I had simply created him, and there he was, so very much himself thirteen years later, with opinions and thoughts and secrets of his own. I grabbed Olaf as he walked past me, whispered to him, told him everything I was thinking. Olaf nodded, then said: And just think of everything he’ll go through, think of everything he’s yet to learn. Now I flinch at the thought of his teenage years, at the disappointments and emotions that will surge above and beyond all those that have come before, but at that point I had no concept of the fact I might not understand him or find myself able talk to him; he was Agnar, my boy.

  I step out of the shower after half an hour, dry my body and wrap a hand towel around my head like a turban. I brush my teeth and my tongue, which still smells and tastes bitter, tinged with alcohol and remorse after the previous night’s activities. I rub my face with moisturiser, my skin feeling three sizes too small. I open the door into the hallway and find myself faced with Agnar on his way to his room. I stop.

  ‘That was a short run,’ I say.

  He turns away, looking at the wall as he passes me by, and I realise that I’m naked, that Agnar is embarrassed at the sight of me. I’m almost moved to laughter, if it weren’t for the fact that it only serves to underscore the new unfamiliarity that has arisen between us. He’s grown up with a natural relationship to nudity, an unspoken aim for Olaf, who has a theory that it will allow Agnar and Hedda to enjoy a healthier relationship to their own bodies in the long, and short, terms. Now Agnar slips past me and into his room without looking at me, and without replying to my remark. I go to my room and climb under the duvet, which feels cool against my warm skin; the hangover ravages my body, my heart beats hard inside my chest, and my nerves prickle on the surface of my skin.