Aftermath

by Carl Frode Tiller

  “No-ho!” she says. It comes out as a burbling chuckle.

  “Okay,” I say, smiling as naturally as I can as I get up. “Be right back,” I say and away I go, past the loudmouthed rockers and up to the bar. I haven’t bought a pack of cigarettes in God knows how long, but I do now. I ask for ten Prince Mild and a box of matches, get them, pay for them, and go outside. The pavement cafés along the harborside are starting to fill up and the buzz of talk and laughter mingles with the din of the traffic on Innherredsveien. I open the cigarette pack, pull out a cigarette, and light it, stand there outside Bare Blåbær smoking and gazing across to Blomsterbrua. This is so childish of me, I’m behaving pretty much the way I did when I was sixteen and took up smoking because it made me feel grown-up and independent. It’s hard to believe, but here I am, doing exactly the same as I did yesterday when Mom came to see me, then too I tried to revert to the person I was fifteen or twenty years ago.

  “Excuse me, do you have a light?” It’s a woman who asks, she comes up to me, smiles at me.

  “Yes, of course,” I say. I push open the little drawer of the matchbox, take out a match, and light it, study the woman as she puts her cigarette between her lips and leans in to me, she can’t be much more than forty, but she has an exceptionally wrinkled face. Her upper lip is a mass of fine vertical lines, it looks rather like a bar code. She sticks the cigarette into the little flame, takes a long drag, cheeks hollowing as she draws the nicotine deep into her lungs.

  “Thanks,” she says, then she tilts her head back and blows the smoke straight up into the air.

  I don’t say anything, just look at her and smile and suddenly I feel dirty again because ever since I gave up smoking I’ve regarded people like this woman as losers. I don’t want to see her and other smokers as losers, I’ve actually tried hard not to think like that, but with no great success. Every time I pass a bar or a restaurant or a public building, especially if it’s raining or snowing or freezing cold, and see the smokers huddled, chittering outside, the word that comes into my head is losers. And now I’m one of them, a loser myself. Here I am, smoking again, I didn’t even want a cigarette, it’s so stupid, I only bought the cigarettes as an instinctive protest against the way Mette goes on, but instead I feel like a loser, which is exactly what she wants. I tuck my left arm under my boobs and prop my right elbow on the back of my left hand, stand like this with the smoldering tip level with my face, I part my lips, about to take another drag, but stop myself, turn around, and chuck the cigarette into the big sand-filled ashtray. It felt surprisingly good to have a smoke and I had almost half of it left, but I’m damned if I’m going to be pressured into playing the loser, I refuse to be that childish. I make my way back to the door, suddenly burning with anger, but still smiling, now I just have to go back inside, sit down, and ask Mette about her wedding plans, I have to sound interested and look as though I’m happy for her, and I am happy for her, of course I am, but not as happy as I would like to be.

  “Would you mind turning off that easy-listening shit,” I hear one of the rocker guys say as I open the door and step inside, it’s the one in the Def Leppard T-shirt. He’s looking at one of the waitresses and screwing up his face to emphasize how dire he finds their choice of music.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she says with a hesitant, almost fearful smile, she can’t be any more than nineteen or twenty and she probably doesn’t dare not to do as this guy says. I stare at him, it would do him good to be taken down a peg or two, him and the rest of his brash, loudmouthed crew. It’s so typical, men in their fifties, they simply expect the rest of the world to bow to their will and their needs, it really pisses me off, I feel like speaking up and saying I think Bo Kaspers Orkester are great and I don’t want the staff to turn them off, but I don’t, I’d better not cause any ruckus. I walk back across to our table, need to calm down, need to compose myself, I don’t like it when Mette carries on the way she was doing just now, but I need to try to overlook that, mustn’t allow myself to be forced into becoming someone I really don’t like to be, so to speak, because that’s what happens when I find it impossible to turn a blind eye to her antics, I get angrier and more resentful and more negative than I would wish, I don’t want to be that way, I like Mette, I love her and I want to be a good sister and a good friend to her, so now I have to be big enough and gracious enough to pull myself together. I have to show her that I’m happy for her, that I’m delighted she’s getting married, I have to try to focus on the fact that this is, after all, good news at what is in other ways a difficult time for our family. I look at her and smile as I weave my way around chairs and tables, but what’s going on, it looks like she’s got the bill, we have nearly a full bottle of wine left, but she has already called the waiter over and he’s standing by our table pressing the buttons on the credit card terminal in his hand.

  “I’ll get it,” Mette says, smiling at me, “and you can give me the cash afterward. Is that okay?”

  “Er, yeah—fine,” I say, looking slightly disconcerted, letting her know that I really hadn’t expected to be leaving so soon.

  “Here you are,” the waiter says, smiling as he places the terminal in front of Mette. She smiles back and removes a card from a very smart white pocketbook with a gold clasp and sticks it in the machine. I look at her, does she want to make sure that I don’t order yet another bottle of wine after this one, is that why she took the opportunity to get the bill while I was out for a smoke? Who knows, it wouldn’t surprise me, though.

  “Er … nothing’s happening,” she murmurs, glancing up at the waiter.

  He takes a step closer, peers at the credit card terminal for a moment, then turns on a smile.

  “Oh, sorry, we only take Visa,” he says.

  “Huh?” Mette says, gazing up at him in surprise. He looks at her, bites his lip as he grins and nods at her card. And then Mette looks down at it too and so do I, but the card in the machine isn’t a Visa card, it’s a card for the 3T gym.

  “Oops,” she says with an affected little laugh, lifting her eyes to the waiter again, and he looks down at her and laughs back, looks straight into her eyes, doing exactly what Mette meant him to do, because no one can tell me she did that by accident, she took out that gym membership card instead of her Visa card because she wanted the waiter to know she works out, this is just another way of letting everyone know how fit and healthy and successful she is, another way of making herself seem desirable, I know it is, and it’s working too, I can see. They hold each other’s gaze, just for a second or two, eyes glowing with mutual attraction.

  “Oh, God,” Mette says, slips the gym card back into her pocketbook and takes out her Visa card, slides it into the terminal, and keys in her PIN. “I can’t even blame it on the wine, I don’t think I’ve had more than a couple of glasses,” she says, shaking her head, still painting a picture of herself as superfit and successful, making it quite clear to the waiter that she hasn’t had any more to drink than a woman ought to have, letting him know that I’ve drunk most of the wine we’ve ordered this evening, which is true enough, but she’s saying it only because she wants to impress the waiter. As soon as I told her I thought he was cute, she made up her mind to impress him. She said he wasn’t her type, and yet she’s sitting there flirting with him, doing it purely to outshine me, I know, doing it simply to prove to herself and me that she’s more successful than me. I watch her as she removes her card from the machine, feel my anger returning, I don’t want to be angry, but I am, I can’t help it.

  “There,” she says, smiling and flashing her eyes at the waiter again and he meets her glance and smiles back.

  “Thank you,” he says just as Bo Kaspers Orkester are turned off and his voice rings out louder than intended in the sudden silence. “Oh!” he says with a little laugh, glancing at the loudspeakers and raising his eyebrows. Then he turns to Mette again. “Come back soon,” he says, looking into her eyes, holding her gaze slightly longer than normal to show that
in her case this is not merely the standard line he gives to all the café’s guests, to show Mette that she is special, and she reacts exactly as he expects her to react.

  “Thank you,” she says, returning his gaze. “We might just take you up on that.”

  “Well, I hope you do,” he says, and by that you he obviously means her and not us, he’s flirting blatantly with her now and she’s encouraging him, keeping her eyes locked on his and smiling that crooked smile of hers, doing all she can to put me in the shade.

  “Well, I’m not going and leaving a full bottle of wine,” I say to Mette. “But don’t mind me, I mean I know you won’t want to be late home, not if it’s your turn to get up with the kids in the morning.” I say this last for the waiter’s benefit, to let him know that Mette is in a relationship and has children, attempting to scupper her little flirtation by betraying that she’s spoken for. I rather relish doing this, but I smile at Mette as innocently as I can. She regards me, she knows the waiter sees her differently now he’s aware that she has a partner and kids waiting for her at home, she knows I’ve put paid to her little flirtation, but not that I did it on purpose, it doesn’t seem like it anyway, because she smiles brightly back at me. She opens her mouth, about to say something, but doesn’t get that far.

  “Bye, then,” the waiter says.

  Mette turns to look at him.

  “Bye,” she says, smiling, waits till he’s gone, then turns to me again. “Oh, well,” she says, “I suppose I could keep you company for a while longer.” I stare at her: I suppose I could keep you company for a while longer, who does she think she is—my social worker? It certainly sounds as if she thinks she’s doing me a favor by staying, as if she thinks I’m lonely and will be upset if she goes, or something like that. Yet another sneaky ploy to make me feel like a loser, I suppose, trying to make out that I’m lonely just because I’m single now.

  “No, it’s okay, just go,” I say, boiling inside, but still with a smile on my lips.

  “No, really, it’s not that late,” she says.

  “You’re absolutely right,” I reply, in a voice that says it’s not late at all and that to be honest I was surprised to hear her talking about going home so soon. I slip my hand into my purse, take out my wallet, and extract a 500-kroner note and a 200. “Here,” I say, slapping the money on the table in front of her. “Before I forget.”

  “Oh, but … no, that’s way too much. Five hundred’s more than enough.”

  “Well, you said yourself I had more wine than you,” I say.

  “Yes, I know but—er, I didn’t mean it that way,” she says.

  “I know what you meant,” I say. I lift the Tabasco bottle out of the little condiments basket, unscrew the red cap, and pour a few drops onto the palm of my hand.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  I look straight at her as I toss the little pool of Tabasco into my mouth, I don’t really know why I do it, I just do. Then I screw the cap on, pop the bottle back into the basket, and look at Mette again, about to explain myself, but before I can do so, Mom appears. I didn’t think she would be coming, not this late in the evening, but here she is. She has already spotted us and is making a beeline for our table. But there’s something about her, something’s happened, something good, she doesn’t take her eyes off us and her face is beaming fit to burst. She doesn’t say anything right away, doesn’t even say hello, she simply plops herself down on a chair and gazes at us, first one, then the other. She seems to be enjoying this situation, enjoying keeping us in suspense.

  “What is it? Is it Agnes?” Mette asks.

  “She’s come out of the coma,” Mom says. “And it looks like everything’s going to be okay. She’ll live,” she adds and then she starts to cry. “It’s … it’s just amazing. Even the doctors are saying it’s a miracle.”

  Trondheim, August 9th–12th, 2006

  At some point during the spring term of 1999 you shelved your thesis on Rabelais and stopped seeing your guidance counselor altogether. You’d had it up to here with the whole subject, you said, tucking your hand under your chin. You had chosen this course because you thought it would provide you with a good introduction to international literature and that this in turn would be of help in your own writing, but over the years since you had taken the foundation course in literature your writing had, in fact, deteriorated. That, for you, was the worst part, much worse than having wasted almost two years on a thesis you were unlikely ever to finish. You had lost the knack of playing and experimenting with your writing, you said. The pieces you had written before you started studying literature might have been rough and unfinished, but the tone had been fresher, livelier, and far more personal than your current, technically perfect, but slick and relentlessly pedestrian style. You blamed all that literary theory, it had made you too self-conscious. It was always there at the back of your mind when you were writing. You would find yourself applying the principles of diverse literary movements to your own work and this led you to impose various dos and don’ts on yourself as a writer. Both consciously and unconsciously you endeavored to fulfill the demands you imagined different literary theorists would place on a good piece of prose and no great literature ever came of that. “What’s in there,” you said, giving your computer a little kick, “has as much in common with literature as practicing scales has with music, it’s stone dead.” You had known this for some time, you had simply tried not to think about it, but now, having sat up all night reading the manuscript of your novel, you could no longer kid yourself.

  In other words, not only was your thesis to be shelved, your novel too would have to be scrapped. I assumed it must be hard to have to acknowledge that years of hard work had, to all intents and purposes, been for nothing and I wanted to console you and sympathize with you, but it appeared that that wasn’t what you needed. You were relieved, you said, no, in fact you were happy, you felt better than you had in a long time, because you knew you had made the right decision. “I’m looking forward to making a fresh start,” you said. But then you surprised me by telling me that making a fresh start didn’t only mean embarking on a new novel, it also involved going abroad. You had been thinking about it for a while, but now you had made up your mind, the time was right. The way of writing and thinking you had adopted in recent years was inextricably bound up with all the things with which you surrounded yourself, you believed, and if you were ever to be able to think and write differently you would have to get away from your tiny apartment, away from the Dragvoll campus, away from Café 3B, away from Trondheim and Norway. For a moment I was afraid you were going to say that you would have to get away from me as well, but fortunately you didn’t. On the contrary, you asked if I would like to come with you. I didn’t have to start on my thesis till the following term so I could simply take the main set texts with me and study in the evenings when you were writing, you said. And it wouldn’t necessarily be all that expensive either. In Central America we could live pretty comfortably on our student loans (strictly speaking you were still a student and, like me, had recently received the latest installment of your loan). You realized, of course, that it would be hard for me to go off and leave Malin. You had become quite close to her so it would be hard for you too, but you weren’t planning on being away for any more than two or three months and that really wasn’t all that long, was it? Lots of people were away from their children for much longer than that.

  I didn’t need any time to think it over, I immediately said yes, stifling all objections. Apart from one cycling tour of Denmark with Torkild and a few holidays in Sweden with Mom, Mette, and May Lene, I had never been outside of Norway and I remember feeling that I had missed out there, in fact I was embarrassed not to have traveled more than I had. I don’t know what it’s like today, but in the nineties going backpacking was pretty much an obligatory rite of passage for young middle-class Norwegians, including many of my friends—the social anthropology students among them never tired of repeating the false
mantra of how they had learned more from this trip or that than they had learned in all their years at university. But what, above all else, made me agree without a second thought was that I was a little bit in love with the new me. I so enjoyed being the free-spirited, spontaneous young woman I had become since I met you. If I hadn’t let you sweep me away with you, I would somehow have been undermining this image of myself and that would simply have been too hard for me to do. Back then I was always looking for proof that I was as young and wild and independent as I wanted to be and tagging along on a journey to distant lands constituted just such proof. I was also convinced that being strong, free, and independent enough to put my own needs first and embark on such a journey made me a good role model for Malin, that if I showed myself to be a liberated woman and acted accordingly, she would, from an early age, automatically think of herself as an independent individual and the equal of anyone.

  That said, though, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Torkild had become much more accommodating over the past year, there would have been no trip to Central America for me. The fact was that he was no longer bitter, he had met someone else and long since got over me and where, for the first year after we broke up, his insistence on sticking to the agreed schedule and flat refusal to allow any leeway—as, for ex ample, if I asked him to swap one or two of his days with Malin with me—were all part of his way of punishing me, he could now be quite flexible. Admittedly he did have his reservations about me being away for as long as three months, but Malin was now two and life as a parent was far easier than it had been only six months earlier, when she had hardly slept at all at night. So it would be fine, he said. And besides, he had his parents just upstairs and they were always ready to help.