He leaned forward and looked through the windscreen, up at the sky. It was late afternoon. The Social Security office and the Job Centre and every office for just about everything had closed their doors. It was time to go home. There was a stream of people coming up the high street, around the bend by the Art Centre and past Doktorgården to the station on their way from Lillestrøm centre, and another stream of people came down from the the platforms in annoyingly slow clusters to the station concourse and there they split into two directions, one to the left towards the city centre, the other to the right towards the car parks at the back, and the river, the Thon Hotel and the Exhibition Hall. But he couldn’t go home now, as the others were, he hadn’t been at work like they had, and anyway it was too early, and there was nothing at home that made him feel at home. There wasn’t one object in the flat he felt was his. Not any more. There were all his books, but they didn’t show him the way like they used to. When he opened one, nothing fell into place. What was the last one he read. It was the fifteen volumes about Maigret he had bought at the door from the man with the trolley exactly one year ago, and he had read them in a flash. He was hardly out of bed before the last one was finished. What shall I do with myself, he thought, during these hours.
There was nothing to do but wait, pass the time. So he drove to Enebakk again, as he did last night, along the 120, and it would be easy to turn off towards Oslo at the Tangen Bridge, if he wanted to, on the Oslo road from Outer Enebakk and drive in from that side, from the south, which he also did last night, or stop at the little shopping centre there and go back again, it didn’t really matter. Twenty years ago he had a girlfriend at the other end, and then he often drove that way in his old car, and she drove the opposite way in hers, and it was so good when she was suddenly there, ringing his doorbell, and sometimes he waited a little so he could see her first in his mind’s eye, from her feet up to her hair, to her eyes, and he would keep them locked in his while he could still not see her, to find out if they were eager, keen, and then open the door to have his guess confirmed. That she wanted to drive such a long distance to sleep next to him, to lie in his bed, to make love to him and wanting only him and no one else and wanting him without reservation made him feel proud and amazed, that’s our road, they said, route 120, they called it the Lifeline. That was long ago now, but when he thought of her, from time to time, he couldn’t hear a false note. He had liked her so much and had liked the forty kilometres between them that gave him space and time to think about her in every possible way and every possible situation as he drove, while the evening settled into its deep blue above Lake Øyeren, and he sang when there was music on, when the stereo played an album from the early years, by Led Zeppelin, maybe, ‘Good Times, Bad Times’, he would sing at the top of his voice behind the glowing speedometer, and it was not her fault that it all came to an end.
At Flateby he drove into the petrol station and parked in the shade of the shop around the corner by the compressed-air machines. He sat there for a few minutes. He wasn’t sorry about anything. He thought hard, and he wasn’t sorry, and he felt warm too, in a pleasant way, he felt excited, impatient. He felt like eating, but the late lunch in Lillestrøm was still heavy in his stomach. He looked at his watch, and less than two hours had passed.
He got out of his car and walked around the corner and into the shop. There was a girl standing behind the counter. She was taking a plastic bag of frozen sausages from the freezer, and with wooden tongs she was putting them on the grill. She had long, dark hair that fell into her eyes when she bent over, and when it fell she straightened her neck and flicked the hair back with her thumbs and tucked it behind her ears, and then she bent forward and it fell down again.
When she heard him come in she looked up, tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled:
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ he said, and he may well have smiled back. She seemed nice. She was good-looking too.
He picked up a Dagbladet and a Verdens Gang from the stand by the door and studied the front pages and put the Verdens Gang back, but it could easily have been the other way around. From one of the shelves he took a Freia Melkesjokolade, the big bar that cost twenty-five kroner, and put both on the counter, and she said:
‘Is that everything.’
‘What else would there be,’ Jim said.
‘Something to drink maybe.’
‘Maybe so,’ Jim said.
He walked over to the cooler cabinets and took a bottle of Coke, the biggest, the one-and-a-half-litre version. It was pointless, what would he do with one and a half litres of Coke. How long was it supposed to last. But he put it on the counter, and she smiled, maybe realising how random his choice had been. Then she rang it all up on the till, and Jim said:
‘Flateby.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Do you live here.’
‘I do,’ she said.
‘Is it any good living here.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Not good perhaps, but it’s all right.’
‘What do young people do here, in Flateby.’
She laughed.
‘This is a real hot rod place, so it’s cars, cars, cars.’ She laughed again and shook her head.
‘But not you.’
‘No, not me.’
She didn’t look the type, either. On the other hand, it wasn’t genetic, being crazy about cars. You could look any way you liked. He knew that well enough from Mørk.
‘I just stand here to earn some money,’ she said, ‘and when I’ve got enough I’ll move into town. It’s expensive in town. I need something to start me off.’
‘That sounds very sensible.’
He took the newspaper, put it under his arm and stuffed the chocolate in his pocket, where it stuck out so far you could see the cows grazing in front of the mountains, and he lifted the big bottle of Coke from the counter and said:
‘Well, good luck to you with whatever you do in the future.’
‘That would be studying literature.’
‘Really,’ he said.
‘English literature,’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a challenge.’
She straightened her back, raised her index finger and said:
‘Do you think I am an automaton, a machine without feelings, do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless.’
‘You think wrong,’ Jim said.
‘Exactly,’ she said.
‘That’s a bit of a tear-jerker,’ he said, ‘isn’t it,’ but he was surprised and a little shaken.
‘Disagree,’ she said.
‘I thought you would,’ Jim said, thinking he should add something, and if so, about literature, about England and Jane Eyre, certainly, he wasn’t completely ignorant, this was his area, or at least one of them, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Good luck in your life,’ he said.
‘Good luck in yours,’ she said.
He was crying on his way to the car. When was it he stopped holding back. Was it this morning, on the bridge, or was it long ago. She couldn’t see him cry from behind the counter, and anyway it didn’t matter. He would never enter the shop at this petrol station again.
And then he just drove. And ate chocolate. The whole bar. In the end it was gone, every single square of it, and only ten minutes later he had to go down a side road, get out of the car as fast as he could and throw up into a ditch. It took time, and it was quite painful. Eventually, he straightened up. He walked a few steps away from the vomit. He stood for a while. It was cool. The sun was low. Fields were all around, recently harvested. The stubble stood yellow and brush-like between the headlands. In the distance the road curved and sank between the steep fields towards Solbergfoss, where Lake Øyeren flowed into the Glomma river and towards the waterfall there, and the power station that looked like a fortress in a film he must have seen, a film about the war perhaps, in Norway, and then there would be wh
ite anoraks against the white snow and daring sabotage raids, and the big explosion and cascades of water and a courage rarely seen on the edge of the steep dam and then the fatal fall, and a face suddenly letting go, more in wonder than in fear sailing through the air in a silent arc, free of all travails at last, from all doubt, the dark body against the white foam, what comes now, the face is saying, what comes now, and the river sweeping on south between abandoned factory buildings all the way to the towns by the sea and out through the fjord and finally coming to a halt and dissolving in the salty, chafing North Sea many nautical miles off the coast of Scotland.
He walked up to the car and got in. In the glove compartment he found a roll of kitchen towel. Along its length there was a border of pixies and Christmas trees. He pulled off about ten Christmas trees and thoroughly wiped his face, his mouth and his eyes, and then he opened the big bottle of Coke and took a long swig. It tasted heavenly. He took another hefty swig and screwed the top back on tight and placed the bottle on the passenger seat and leaned back and instantly fell asleep, and when he awoke it was confusingly dark. He looked at his watch, he hadn’t slept for long, half an hour, perhaps a little more, but when the sun went down the light was fading fast. He had no idea where he was. There was nothing around the car that he had seen before. He thought: My name is Jim. I do know where I am. But he didn’t. It didn’t come back to him.
He turned the key and the engine started and the lights came on and lit up the trees in front of the car and some way down both sides, like inside a house, in a room, and made everything seem even more alien, and he thought, if I’ve driven in here, I can back out, and that was what he did, and after only a few metres in the red shine from the rear lights the yellow signposts came into view with the names of the places they were pointing to and the distances there, and it said nine kilometres to one and five to another, and the places were places he knew from the map. He made a U-turn as the trees swept past in the light from the headlamps, and he got on to the road, on the 120, and started to drive slowly back through all of Enebakk, through Flateby and a bit faster towards Lillestrøm and finally up the hills to the flat where he lived on top of the ridge.
On his way up the steps from the garages below the block he met the neighbour who lived opposite him on the ground floor. The neighbour stopped and smiled, his name was Sandem, and then Jim also had to stop. Sandem was a nice man, a good deal younger than Jim, at least ten years younger, or more, maybe twenty years younger, with a wife and two children in the kindergarten, they were all nice.
‘Are you going to watch the match tonight,’ he said.
Jim didn’t know which match, nothing came up when he searched his mind, was it an important match tonight, was it the cup, but Vålerenga had been knocked out before the quarter-final, it was a big disappointment, and so he wasn’t interested any more. He had gone from supporting Lillestrøm to supporting Vålerenga, and that wasn’t something he could talk about in public. But the semi-finals would be played on a Sunday, so that couldn’t be the match his neighbour meant, and Jim didn’t dare ask.
‘No, I have to turn in early.’
‘Well, it’s on a bit late,’ Sandem said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Jim said.
‘Or else we could have watched it at my place. I’m on late shift tomorrow. There is plenty of beer in the fridge.’ He smiled.
Late shift, Jim thought. He was absolutely positive the neighbour knew he was off sick or at least had been. At some point he must have told him, but it wasn’t an issue here. Sandem was considerate.
‘We’ll catch the next game,’ Jim said. ‘Perhaps the Cup final.’ And he could safely say that.
‘That would be nice,’ Sandem said. ‘My wife’s not at all interested. She leaves the room the minute there’s a pair of shorts on the screen, and the kids are still too small. It’s boring always sitting there alone,’ and then he said:
‘You’re going out fishing, then, are you.’ He smiled again. How can he know that I go fishing at night, Jim thought. I haven’t told him. But then he remembered they had bumped into each other a couple of times early in the morning when Jim was on his way back from the bridge, and Sandem was on his way home after night shift. Then they’d barely said hello. Sandem was tired, and Jim was tired, and that was that, and he thought, my old reefer jacket must have smelt of fish, or the smell must have come from the bag, yes, definitely, the bag, that was where he kept the fish, if he had caught any, until he gave them away.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s my plan,’ but it wasn’t his plan. He didn’t know why he said that. It was stupid of him. It’s stupid when you say things aloud, he thought, they commit you, you can’t get them out of your head.
‘Good fishing then,’ Sandem said, and Jim said thank you, and Sandem said, ‘See you.’
Jim hung up his coat in the hall on the peg under the hat shelf that had never seen a hat, took out his wallet, took off his shoes and walked in his stockinged feet through the living room to the kitchen with his wallet in his hand and put it on the worktop and took the car keys from his trouser pocket and put them beside the wallet, and the wristwatch he took off, and he lined them all up in the middle of the worktop, and suddenly he was really hungry, it was like a blow, and he threw open the fridge door and grabbed two eggs and butter, put the pan on the hotplate, and by willpower alone, he made the eggs fry faster than they would normally have done and was on his toes when he was buttering the bread, and he only just managed to sit down at the kitchen table before he started to eat.
Then he did the dishes. And emptied the fridge. And washed it thoroughly inside and threw everything that was old in the bin and put the rest back. And he wiped down every surface in the kitchen and in the living room. And he hoovered all the rooms. And he put his books back on the shelves where they belonged in alphabetical order. In the bedroom he made the bed with military precision. At least he thought it was. He was tired again, and he was really, really tired, but he didn’t lie down. And he went back to the living room and looked slowly around him. There wasn’t much more he could do.
He sat down on the sofa with his pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, and flicked out a cigarette and a matchstick and lit the cigarette, and then he thought, but, Jim, wasn’t this the week you were giving them up. And then he had to laugh, but there was no one to hear him, so he stopped at once. He drew the smoke down into his lungs, and it tasted so good, and not once did he have to cough, and then he sat smoking until the cigarette was finished, and he crushed the butt in the ashtray with his index finger and lay back on the sofa looking up at the concrete ceiling through the blue smoke. To get something to hold in the ceiling, like a metal hook, he had to go down to the storeroom in the basement where he had his drill, a Black & Decker he was given for his fiftieth birthday, and then to find a sturdy Rawlplug he could knock into the hole he had made so the hook would stay put when he had screwed it in, but it was bedtime now for every single child in the block and they should have their bedtime stories read to them without the roar of a drill through the walls. So that was no good. It’s no good here, he thought.
JIM ⋅ THE LAST NIGHT CONTINUED ⋅ SEPTEMBER 2006
JIM DIDN’T KNOW how long he had been lying like this. Time was melting. He wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t awake, he was dreaming, but he didn’t know what he was dreaming. If dreams could be empty, could be nothing but a colour, then it was purple, the dream he’d had.
It was completely dark outside now and getting dark inside in the living room, it was late, or it was early. It was night. Only the lamp in the hall was lit and it sent in a slanting white light through the living room past the TV. He could see it from where he was lying, but the TV wasn’t on. And he stayed on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. Where else was there to look. Out of the window. Jesus, was he going to be like the old ladies sitting at their windowsills observing the lives of others.
He pulled himself up by the armrest and switched on the TV. What match did Sandem m
ean. Jim moved his thumb from one channel to the next. In the end he found Eurosport and the dying seconds of a football game. Manchester United versus Reading. That must have been the match Sandem had been thinking of, everywhere in this country there were people who loved Manchester United. But it looked like the replay of an earlier game, because the clock on the game and the clock on the screen showed different times. On the TV it was a quarter-past two. Anyway, the match ended in a draw, 1–1. The young boy Ronaldo had saved a point for a hard-pressed United, and here we speak of Ronaldo from Portugal, not Brazil. He was a great talent, and Solskjær was still in the team, and the fans were singing for him on the terraces, they sang, You are my Solskjær, my only Solskjær, and it was pretty moving, and he was about to cry again, and then he sat up and thought, Christ, I can’t take this any more.
He stood up from the sofa and went into the bathroom and filled the basin to the brim and plunged his face in, and the water flooded over and splashed all over the floor where he was standing in stockinged feet. He tried to keep his eyes open, but he wasn’t able to, although you could do it in the sea when you were swimming and were about to dive and you could see the jellyfish moving against the current and the seaweed swaying and the flounders rising from the bottom in a swirl of sand and settling some other place and letting the sand fall upon them and be gone. It is what it is, he thought, It’s over. He raised his head, and the water poured off his hair and down his forehead and down over his eyes and chin, and he thought, I said I would go, so I have to go. And really, it didn’t matter whether he was here or there. He dried his face hard with the towel, he felt sharper now, more alert. He pulled off his wet socks and dried his feet and found some clean socks in a basket. Then he went into the hall, and from the closet he took out the black bag and the pretty biscuit tin from Sætre Kjeksfabrikk with his fishing gear in it and put the tin in the bag, and from a hook on the wall he brought down a tow rope with a shiny carabiner at each end. The rope was old and had seen several cars come and go, so he examined it carefully, but the rope was in one piece and could take a ton or more on flat ground, though nowhere near as much when hanging from a tree, or a bridge, but it didn’t need to. He coiled it round his elbow and put it in the bag.