A Private Haunting (6 page)

Spencer P.

Jonas really didn't like that kid. A few words were all it took for Spencer P to switch back on the break-in speculation that Jonas had finally managed to switch off. A draughtsman with no confidence, that was him, drawing a line, rubbing it out, drawing another…

He'd been standing in the Post Office queue, staring into empty space after a day on the potholes.

‘You shouldn't do that, bro.'

Spencer P was suddenly beside him. Mocking eyes and a vague leer. He had a soul patch and three diamond studs in his left ear. A wannabe pimp but the accent more Sloane than South Central.

‘Sorry?'

‘The
magazines,
Mr M.'

He followed his gaze to the newspaper racks.

‘All that trauma. All those poor people. Those victims. You never know when it's going to be you, eh?'

Spencer P picked up a magazine,
Break Time
. Beside it were several others, similar titles, smiling, pretty women but jarring, make-you-frown headlines.
Blind
girl kept as sex slave... I changed the
locks but was stabbed again... Stiletto psycho...
‘You shouldn't read that rubbish.'

‘I wasn't.'

‘It's well screwed up. Get this, right.' And Spencer P began telling a graphic story of a home invasion he said was true but must be made up and if made up then Spencer P was messed up. ‘It went on for
three
days, man
, they must have been enjoying it, the husband made to watch everything and the kids tied up. They were never caught, Mr M. Can you imagine that happening to you? What do they say at the end of
Crimewatch
? ‘‘Don't have nightmares''.'

With that Spencer P was gone. Had the kid just happened to glance in and see Jonas or had he followed him there? Was that story
rehearsed
? Jonas looked back at the magazines. As the queue shuffled he found himself picking up copies of
True
Life
and
Sensational
.

Killed for thrills…

Home is where
the death is
…

Sensationalised tears in the fabric of normality. Off-kilter incidents, one of which had now happened to Jonas.
The Jasmine-Scented Intruder
. Hardly a howitzer of weirdness but strange enough to crank the heart rate as he opened the front door of End Point. This time three whiskies made it seem unnerving rather than amusing. That night he read the magazines from cover to cover and checked the windows and doors twice before going to bed. He fell asleep to images of Spencer P, wallowing in a steaming bath. That smug little smile.

 

His mental state improved with sleep and regressed with breakfast. He was drinking green tea in the sun room, taking in the day, the peace, the new addition to the collection of pot pants and herbs on the window sill. A straggly shrub with lots of six-petalled flowers, like little white starfish.

Jasmine.

Know the plants
, it's what he told the kids.

On Tuesday afternoon, he got back from work and found an Amazon package waiting with the mail. A DVD of
Aladdin.
The back cover told him that Aladdin's girlfriend was called Jasmine. Again, he saw Spencer P's smug face, spluttering now as he throttled the little bastard.

Then Eggers appeared earlier than usual on Thursday to pick him up. He left him in the kitchen and went for a shower, a sudden suspicion making him creep downstairs. A cupboard door was open. Behind it was Eggers, rubbing a particularly scented hand cream around the rims of his mugs.

‘You swine. I've been freaking out! I thought it was Spencer P.'

‘Spencer? Why would it be him? And why do you call him Spencer P? He's not a fuckin
rapper
.'

Thursday they finished early, Boss Hogg with a mysterious
appointment
that Eggers knew all about, damn straight, a girl named Sue and a husband far away. They stayed in town, a few beers in the park. It was Jonas's idea to hire a boat at the lake, working the oars as Eggers worked the Stella: six cans in forty-five minutes. He fell asleep with his head on the stern.

Jonas paddled quietly to shore, removed the oars and gently pushed the boat back out.

‘You fucker!'

‘Swim for it.'

‘Sod off!'

‘Nice day for a swim.'

‘
Jonas
.'

‘Did you break into my house and have a bath?'

‘You on about that again?'

‘I can leave or I can come and tow you in. Easy is.'

‘Easy AS, you knob!'

‘That's hardly the attitude.'

‘Look. I didn't break into your house and have a
bath
. Are you insane? Why would
anyone
do that?'

 

That night Jonas dreamt of boats. These dreams that came in cycles, a psychic turning every six months or so. Tonight there was no rabbit and no child. But still blood. There was always blood.

He was crouched on the shore of a vast sea, scrubbing his sticky red hands. Eggers rowed back and forth, shouting
come and join me,
Jonas
. Big Haakon appeared in a deerskin coracle. Then Axel in a dinghy, someone new each time he looked: family and school friends, teaching colleagues, all in different vessels, canoes and skiffs, tug boats, all shouting
come and join me,
Jonas
. He shook his head, shouting that he couldn't, he had to clean his hands.

And then Mary. A gondola parting the throng, beckoning to him. Jonas smiled and the blood was gone. A rowing boat materialised but before he could push it out a storm blew up, obscuring everyone. The last thing he saw was the Hirtshals night ferry, Eva and Anya.

He woke late, just after seven. Outside, Eggers was blasting the horn, shattering the last dream-image. Mary, beckoning him. He felt an old, old sensation and stepped into the day.

‘You pulling your pud in there?'

‘I did dream about you last night.'

Eggers gunned the van and smirked. ‘Wet dream, eh?'

‘Wet as your boots.'

The smirk vanished. Eggers slammed the gear into second. He was wearing an old pair of boots. Why he waded to the lakeside without taking off his boots remained a mystery.

Eggers said nothing for the rest of the drive to the ring road. In the silence, Jonas thought about boats; the Skagerrak trawlers and the weekend dinghies, the big boys permitted by parents to cast darrows for the mackerel, far out in their rowing boats and Jonas so envious.

 

The job pressed. Flashbacks in the heat. Naples. Summer of '02, working the roads for the mafia gangs. A similar clinging dust, jackhammers still ringing as he tried to sleep in that broiling shack. And the Italians were always pissed off about something. The English were much quieter.

Apart from Boss Hogg. A big-bellied cowboy in a white hard hat.
Move your delicate arse and move it
now
, back into that hard sun, the ring road a tightening noose and the traffic stunning. In Norway you could drive miles without meeting another car. Here, the busier the road the faster the drivers, hair trigger primed when forced to slow down. Jonas couldn't imagine a Norwegian opening a conversation with an account of the route taken and why, the other options, that swine of a junction twelve bottleneck. All these lives boxed in hot metal.

He stuck to boats. Canal barges on the heat-hazed river that curved under the road bridge, half a mile downhill from the fix site. A rhythm locked on, a shovel of tar and a glance at the river, the hard sun glinting, broken, white mirrors on the black roofs of the moored boats.

 

He had lunch down there. Slumber-time by the moving stillness, feet in the water and eyes closed. When he opened them years had passed, a rowing boat on the far bank and two kids dangling bow lines. Let's call them Jonas and Axel. Big Haakon keeping a wary eye, a benevolent giant.

Haakon was the first to take them out on the water, Jonas's dad interested only in his golf handicap and Axel's in the ice hockey he excelled at before the booze. They once tried to settle on one word that summed up what their fathers thought of them. It took a while.

Bothersome.

Haakon taught them about fishing with the same easy patience he taught them about plants and trees. Simple things like telling a mackerel from a herring by the patterns on their backs, hookless techniques like worm-blobs for catching eels, more scientific stuff like image refraction
. Always kneel
when you're fishing. Remember to keep your shadow off
the water.

Axel chose Big Haakon's rowing boat as the getaway vessel when he ran away. Haakon said nothing but knew he was camping wild on the forested island on the other side of the point.

Aegir's Isle. They named it after the Norse god of the sea. For three nights Jonas sneaked out, Axel rowing across to get him. They sat by the fire, eating tinned sardines and honing the design of the hut that would let them live there permanently. It was easy to believe, back then, that freedom was as simple as choosing it. No one had told them about dreams, all those faces, like a series of last visits and who knows when the Big Black would finally fall.

A coot shrieked. Jonas flinched and watched the moorhen flee. The rowing boat boys pulled up their lines. Two crayfish they smashed on the gunwale. He couldn't hold back the traffic, the noose, tighter and louder. He heard the storm and saw the night ferry again, Larvik to Hirtshals, Eva and Anya and a hollowness in his gut. The sun dimmed and he shivered.

It was unsettling how something which never happened somehow persisted as dark patches on memory's big canvas, so that nothing remembered was certain, not even the jewels hidden away and protected so closely.

 

‘Bergen?'

‘Yes,' said Jonas.

‘I remember Bergen.'

‘It must have been different then.'

‘Who knows, I've never been back. Might not have changed a bit. Those houses by the harbour, ancient they were. Maybe the place hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Certainly seemed like that when the night-lights were on. Reflections on the water. Nothing like it, Jonas.'

‘I remember it well.'

‘If you remember it then what are you doing here?'

‘I could ask the same.'

But Jonas never did. To know the end of the story was to end its telling, and the telling was the reason he sought out old Sam tonight as on so many others. Sam meant Bergen.

Again, Jonas let Sam's story lull and take him, until somehow it could be his own and then was.

‘I had a woman there.'

‘There's always a woman.'

‘Blonde hair. Right down her back. I had two nights there while the boat was loaded, some fleapit up by the cathedral.'

‘St. Olav's.'

‘That's the one. She worked in a bar.'

Logen's
, Jonas remembered.

‘She was... passionate, I tell you that.'

‘That's Norwegians for you!'

‘Yeah. You Norwegians, you're so passionate, eh?'

A slicing voice. Jonas looked up into the red face and buzz-cut hair of someone he didn't know.

‘Come again?'

‘Exactly!
Sex
, s'all you think about.'

Buzz Cut's fat friend started giggling, an odd nasal snuffle, eyes tight shut with cartoon lines.

‘Come on now, John,' said Sam. ‘Let Jonas be.'

Buzz Cut put an arm round the old man's shoulders. ‘No worries, just having a laugh with the Viking.'

He popped a cigarette into his mouth and grinned. Jonas watched him walk away. He didn't know this person. That licence to condescend to a stranger, where do you apply for it?

Sam too watched Buzz Cut but didn't see him, his gaze stalled somewhere in the middle distance. ‘I was going to stay there, you know. Do something or other. But I didn't. You know the damnedest thing? I can't even remember her name. I can't see her face, can't
see
it.'

He
expected
, did Jonas. Likely, he expected too much, but rather expect and be disappointed than doubt and be cynical. But even Jonas did not expect old Sam. The first time he heard this story was in
The
Lion
, a few weeks after he moved to the village. Standing at the bar ordering a beer. Sam leaned in and asked in Swedish what his name was. Jonas's mouth did the cartoon drop. In English, he replied that he was Norwegian and nearly fell over when the question was repeated in his own language. Old Sam explained that he'd sailed the Newcastle-Bergen route for over thirty years. Merchant Navy, engineer second class.

The old man knew: the steep cobbles and fussy window boxes of Nordnes; the phosphorescent winter glow of those white-panelled houses; the mist on Mt Fløyen as ethereal as a Japanese landscape. And Jonas knew Sam's lost woman too, the barmaid with the blonde hair and the way she turned and winked and, quick-shifting, became his wife, Eva, and every time a different moment and now that evening of the REM tribute band and afterwards a bottle of wine in Byparken and singing
Man on the Moon
as the man himself looks down from his full whiteness in the east and
yes, I see him, Jonas, I've never
noticed him before…

‘You should have got married, Jonas.'

‘It never happened for me.'

The old man suspected, of course. He tapped Jonas on the hand. ‘There's time for everything.'

It troubled him, the way Eva had retreated to the edge of the light. Once upon a more fragile time he dreamed of her every night. Yet now it sometimes felt he had to remember to remember. Where there was presence there was still existence. Something like that.

‘Are you a dreaming man?'