One time Tommy came to tell me that Jonsen had given him a full-time job at the sawmill. Jonsen owned it now. The man who had run it before was called Johannes Kallum, he ran the Kallum Saw Mill, as we used to call it, though in fact it had another name, and Kallum was a notorious drunkard. He had supplies of brandy hidden all around the site, in piles of timber, behind stacks of planks, and he had even buried a bottle of Brandy Special in a heap of wood chips, someone found out, and in his office too, he kept a bottle in the bottom drawer, everyone knew, and he drank without restraint during working hours and drove when he was drunk. He forgot to write down orders and forgot to pay his employees, so at the last minute Jonsen took out a loan from Mørk Sparekasse and bought the lot before it all came tumbling down, and now apparently it was going very well, Lydersen said. But he didn’t like Jonsen, he didn’t like anyone from our neighbourhood. He thought they were tinkers, or like the hillbillies in American films. Lydersen was more than fifty years old and he had never left the district, so of course he had no idea what he was talking about. But as time passed I came to think that maybe he was right.
Tommy came in to Mørk a few more times, in January and February, but this spring, in 1970, I had barely seen him and, to be honest, I had grown used to him not being there. I did miss him of course, it wasn’t that, but the missing had no shape any more, we were no longer a couple, not like before, not the way Tommy wanted, if that was what he wanted, we were older now, and everything was different, and I couldn’t look in two directions at the same time. It just didn’t work. I had to move on.
I put my jacket on at full speed, glanced at the clock, and Jesus, was I in a hurry, Tommy, Tommy, why do you have to come just now, and then I ran down the stairs in stockinged feet as quietly as I could, because Lydersen was home from work already, and we’d had dinner, and now he was lying down in the best room, which was warm and not like in winter when it was closed, and he would have a nap there as he always did after dinner, and I didn’t know if he could hear me on the stairs. I hoped not. I was down in the hall and put on my shoes and rushed out of the door and dropped my gym bag on the doorstep so I wouldn’t have to go back in for it, but then I turned and picked it up and peered over the neighbour’s hedge as I ran, and his car was parked with its nose in the garage, and I thought, how is it possible for a car to look so Christian, surely they don’t make them like that in the factory, as though they had a large cross pasted to the windscreen, a transparent cross, or did it have something to do with heredity and environment, which we were learning about at school in the biology lessons, could you say the same about cars, could they change according to their owner, although cars, strictly speaking, had nothing to do with biology. It was just rubbish, what I was thinking, but it’s what ran through my head.
I came out from the alley and I wasn’t running now, but walking slowly across the road to the petrol station, where Tommy was standing. He saw me at once and as he straightened up, he squared his shoulders, he was such a stylish, dark, mysterious boy, I had always thought, and I wondered, how could it be possible for Tommy to just appear in Mørk when it suited him and be standing by the petrol pumps expecting me to spot him, however long it was since we last met, and then for me to come over and talk to him and follow him down behind the Co-op. But I did, every single time he came to Mørk, I left the house to meet him, but I could just as easily have been somewhere else. He was lucky. I was often on the move, there was so much to do, I had new friends to meet. And then it struck me. That it was exactly what I had been. Somewhere else. Perhaps many, many times. And he had been standing here, waiting, and I hadn’t realised, and he never mentioned it later because he was proud. How could I have been so stupid as to think he came to Mørk only the few times I was in the right place to make him visible. As though we were on the same wavelength. But that’s what we were not. We had been, I knew, but we weren’t any longer.
I was across the road. I felt very
seen
, and he stood where he stood, and when I walked over, the tarmac felt like air beneath the soles of my feet, and there was a physical pull I had forgotten he had, but I didn’t touch him, I stopped a few metres away. I was out of breath. I tried to hide it by closing my mouth, but that made it worse.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Have you been waiting long.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’ But it wasn’t true, he had been here for quite some time, I could see it from the way he was resting his body, first on one leg, then the other, as you do when you have been standing for too long. Like behind the counter in a shop.
‘Are you in a hurry,’ he said. It was so strange, his voice was so formal, every word was given its full pronunciation, even the ‘are’ was long, and it didn’t bring us any closer.
‘A little,’ I said, and he didn’t ask why, and I was glad he didn’t. I had nothing to hide, he just didn’t ask, and that was fine. But I stood there shifting from one foot to the other.
‘Is it very important, Tommy,’ I said. ‘It’s true, I’m in a hurry, honestly,’ and I was listening for the sound of my neighbour’s car, and I thought I heard footsteps across the flagstones and someone knocking at a door, maybe our door, well, Lydersen’s door, but that wouldn’t be possible from this distance.
‘I think it’s important,’ he said.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What is it then, Tommy.’
He cleared his throat twice. Is he going to give a speech, I wondered, like you do at confirmations, he was
that
formal, he didn’t even swear, as he nearly always did, but I didn’t invite him to my confirmation. Lydersen had said no, point blank, he didn’t even want to talk about it, but later I realised I had given in too easily.
‘This is just between you and me,’ Tommy said.
‘But, Tommy, that’s no good. It’s not just the two of us any more. It’s not like it used to be.’
‘So I have gathered,’ he said, in a very formal tone. He hadn’t said ‘gathered’ once in the whole of his life, we always said: did you ‘get’ me or did you ‘get’ that, and it wasn’t easy for me to see what his feelings were, whether it was all right for him that it wasn’t
us two
any more, or whether he was still upset.
‘I just wanted you to know,’ he said, ‘that I’m going to burn our house down. Very soon.’
‘Which house,’ I said. We weren’t on the same wavelength at all. He just looked at me. The sun was shining. There was a smell of petrol. It was so quiet around us, the air wasn’t moving, no cars were on their way in or out of the petrol station, not a sound. Just outside the silence a man was standing on the church steps, in jeans, Wranglers probably, you couldn’t get anything else around here. A distant tractor drove into a field, and a cock crowed.
‘Oh, yes. Our house,’ I said, ‘the house that was our house, I mean, before’, and I listened again for the neighbour’s car, and now I was certain it had started. I was desperate. Tommy, Tommy, I thought, and was standing there shifting my feet as if I had to go to the toilet, why did you have to come now.
‘Burn it down. What are you saying.’
‘Yes, I’m going to burn our house down,’ he said, and then he said: ‘Because it’s standing there, just like it was.’
‘Is it,’ I said. I hadn’t been there once since I moved out, and I hadn’t given it a thought in a long time. But it was probably just as we had left it. I hadn’t heard anything else. ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is. We’ve been there and looked inside. I pulled off all the boards over one window. It was easy. They were rotten through.’
‘Who’s we,’ I said. ‘Jim and you.’
‘Yes, Jim and me,’ he said. ‘What other we would that be.’ And then he said: ‘Inside the house it looks exactly as it did when we lived there. Only
us
, not when Dad was there.’
That was probably true, but it was a strange thought. I hadn’t heard about any new people moving in, a new family, but it felt odd that everything was as it had been then, in the living room, the other rooms, on the stairs, for nothing felt now as it felt then. Everything had changed. But inside the house everything had stood still. It made me uncomfortable thinking about it.
‘Does it,’ I said. I repeated myself. It was embarrassing. But I couldn’t concentrate, I had to go.
‘Yes it does,’ he said. ‘And I can’t help thinking about it. I can’t sleep at nights. I’m fed up. So now I’m going to burn the crap down. You can come with me if you like. That’s why I’m here.’
‘What. No, no, Tommy, I can’t do that, are you out of your mind. It’s a crime. We would be arsonists. We could be arrested and put in prison. You could, Tommy, please don’t even think about it.’
‘Who does the house really belong to,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it our house,’ he said. ‘Did
you
get any money for it. Did
I
get any money for it. No, we didn’t. So I can do what I like with the house. If you don’t want to be part of it, that’s fine by me. We could have done it together. That would be the right thing. But if you don’t want to, I’ll do it on my own.’
‘But, Tommy, why do you have to burn it down. You don’t need to burn it down, do you.’
‘Yes, I do. Now that nothing’s like it was before, the damn house shouldn’t be like it was, either. It’s not right. I didn’t get it until I looked through the window. Goddamnit, Siri, I can’t sleep at night,’ he said, and now he wasn’t formal at all.
‘But, Tommy, I’ve got to go to handball training.’
‘Handball training.’ He looked down at my bag. He hadn’t noticed it until now. ‘Do you have to go to handball training,’ he said.
‘Yes, I
do
.’ Past Tommy’s shoulder I could see the über-Christian neighbour’s car turning in to the crossroads, and I didn’t know if he had given up on me or was looking for me. He might well have been, because he slowed down and for a moment the car stopped altogether, and then I started to run with the bag in my hand, I waved to the neighbour, and he saw me and waved back. A huge vehicle passed me on its way into the petrol station, a removal van it was, and it stopped with a hiss of brakes, and I glanced back as I ran, but by then Tommy was lost behind the van.
I WALKED INTO
the Central Hospital through the door facing the car park, past the reception and the kiosk and past the café towards the staircase. One floor lower was the Bunker, where Jim was admitted in 1971, that was more than thirty years ago, and we were so young then, it’s easy to forget that everything looks different when you are young, it looks better, there is so much time, and then suddenly everything is worse, much worse, the whole world blown sky high from one day to the next. This time I was going up to the third floor, and before I always ran up the stairs, but now I took the lift. I drank too much.That was why.
On the third floor I passed the duty room, and then I walked three doors down the corridor and into the room where Jonsen was. I had known him all my life. The doctor was standing at his bedside, they were talking, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then Jonsen turned his head on the pillow and saw me come in. He smiled, and the doctor turned and saw me and took one step back, one to the side, he had seen me before, the day we arrived at the hospital in a helicopter, when Jonsen had collapsed in front of me in his living room, but I hadn’t been there since, I had been away, in Haugesund, it wasn’t good, but that’s the way it was. I said hello, and the doctor said hello.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How’s it going.’
‘Not so good, my friend,’ Jonsen said.
‘I had to go to Haugesund,’ I said. ‘It was quite important. I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. He was still smiling, but the skin under his eyes was blue, almost black. I had a book with me, by John Steinbeck, I thought maybe he hadn’t read. Jim gave it to me one time when we were boys, it said to me from him on the title page. I found it in a box at home when I was going through the basement. I put it on the bedside table. Jonsen stretched his hand over and he slowly turned the book round with his index finger and said:
‘I haven’t read this one.’ He looked surprised, he was sure he had read all of Steinbeck’s books, but he hadn’t.
‘The plot takes place in Norway,’ I said. ‘During the war.’
He looked up at me. ‘You’re having me on.’
‘I’m not having you on,’ I said.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said, and the doctor coughed quietly behind my back, or maybe he was laughing. There are all kinds of doctors.
‘It’s not bad,’ I said, but I had no idea whether it was good or bad. I had simply read it. It was a long time ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I read a novel.
‘I hope there is time to read it,’ he said.
‘You’ll have plenty,’ I said.
‘That’s not so sure, my friend.’
That was the second time he had said that, my friend. He never said that before. He just said Tommy. He looked me in the eye a little too firmly. I turned. The doctor was chewing his bottom lip, holding his hands tightly behind his back and studying the floor. He slowly shook his head. I turned back.
‘What’s that supposed to mean.’
‘I haven’t got long left, my friend.’
Goddamnit, stop saying my friend, I thought. I can’t take it.
‘Hell, surely you’ve got time to read a book,’ I said, and that was a pathetic thing to say, for what has a book got to do with anything when someone is dying. When Jonsen is dying.
‘Are you going to die,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, and I said:
‘Yes, but I mean
now
, are you going to die
now
,’ I said.
‘He’s given me two or three weeks,’ Jonsen said, nodding to the doctor who was still standing there, half behind me. I had already forgotten him, he was certainly a discreet doctor. ‘There’s nothing they can do, he says,’ Jonsen said.
‘Of course there is something they can do,’ I said. ‘This is 2006 not 1706.’
‘It’s too late now,’ Jonsen said. He was exhausted, his voice had no energy, no air in it.