‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Come on. I’ll drive you home,’ and I heard the policeman slowly let out his breath, and my father put on a broad smile from behind his beard and said:
‘What a fine coat you’ve got, I’ll give you that. It has style. I’ll bet it cost you serious money.’
‘Yes, it did cost serious money,’ I said, and turned and walked out of the cell, and my father came out after me, clutching his trousers and then the policeman locked the door behind us. We walked down the corridor and into another room where his possessions were returned to him, and, because his hands were shaking so badly, I had to sign for each item as he was unable to do it himself, and for his shoes and his belt I had to sign, and for what was left in his wallet, and the pocket knife, I think we’d better hang on to that, the policeman said, and I said, that’s fine, just keep it, and then I signed for the jacket. I could have sworn it was the same jacket he was wearing the last time I saw him by the railway station only two hundred metres from this large house that didn’t exist then, in front of the old, heavy, stone-grey station building, and not the modern one that was put up beside it.
The policeman let us out of a door at the back of the building. Then we didn’t have to push our way through the crowd with their passports and tickets and A4 police checks, and I could see my father was limping on his right leg as we crossed the first car park and then the second one over to my new, grey Mercedes with the tinted windscreen, and he said:
‘Oh, what a car, it’s nice, and the coat, and the car, it must have cost serious money, that car,’ and I said:
‘Yes, sure, it cost serious money.’
‘But I can’t sit in that car with these clothes on,’ he said, and I looked at his clothes, and he did have a point.
‘Just get in,’ I said, and he opened the door at the back, and I said:
‘No, you sit in the front.’
‘Ah, but, I can’t, can I.’
‘Yes you can, for God’s sake, just sit in the goddamn front, come on, you cannot sit in the back. Jesus Christ.’ And very carefully he sat down in the front, trying as hard as he could to leave a thin layer of air between his backside and the fragrant, immaculate leather cover I had taken the plastic off only a few days ago. Then we turned out of the car park in front of the building they called Justisen, and I left Lillestrøm the same way I had come and drove up the E6 and past the turn-offs to both this place and that place and all the places I couldn’t give a damn about or who lived there and on up past Mørk station.
I turned into the drive of the house he claimed was his. I had never seen it before. It was north of Mørk, and a little to the west, and the railway line wasn’t even close and never had been. The bus stop was a kilometre’s walk, and there was only one bus a day, except at weekends when there was no bus at all. That was the kind of place it was, meaningful only for those who lived there, and barely that. I had cycled past with Jim a couple of times in my childhood to go fishing in a little river even further to the west. There was a waterfall and a pool with good fishing. It was Jim who liked fishing, but I always went along, he was my best friend, so at Christmas I wished for a rod with a spinner and all, and Jonsen gave me one, he was the one who listened, and no one else. And then the local council got it into their heads to build a dam, and the waterfall stopped falling, and we stopped going there. We didn’t care, there were other places we could go.
He got out of the car under his own steam, he didn’t need any help, he felt better now, he said, with the belt back on his trousers.
I got out too, on my side, thinking, I’ll complete this mission, and then I’ll be off, I won’t stop down here by the road, I’ll follow him to the door, and then I’ll be gone.
There was a man on the steps of the house next to my father’s. He was smoking. He looked at us as though he wanted to tell us something, and I looked back at him and was ready to hear what he had to say, he was my father’s neighbour and he gave a slight nod, and then he wasn’t interested after all and turned away and stared up the road.
‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, that’s nice,’ he said. ‘You walk with me, that’s good, that’s how it should be, a son walking his dad home, that’s it, and you can come in and have a cup of coffee as well, of course you can, that’s how it should be, I’ll put the kettle on, it’ll be ready in no time, but you know, I’ve only got instant coffee, you probably don’t drink instant coffee any more, not like you used to, not with that car and all, you probably drink something French, what’s it called, café crème, or something it’s called, you do that, don’t you.’
It was true I drank coffee when I was a boy, he forced me to when I was ten, and I became addicted, he mixed it with sugar and milk and sat watching me as I poured it down, have another cup, he said, and I still drink coffee that way, with sugar and milk, but I couldn’t remember if what we drank was instant coffee, if someone had invented instant coffee by then, I didn’t think so, and if they had, it could only be in America, so back then I was sure my father made the usual boiled coffee.
We were up by the doorsteps. He had staggered and limped over the flagstones, but he wasn’t drunk now, there were just these rubber legs, he was so thin, and I said:
‘That’s it then. Is your door unlocked.’
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s unlocked, but you must come in and have a coffee, it’s all wrong if you don’t come into your dad’s house and have a cup, we haven’t seen each other for such a long time, but you’re the same, I knew you would be, Tommy is the same boy he always was, I said to the police,’ but we hadn’t seen each other for forty years, and I didn’t know how he could say something so ridiculous, the boy with the bat then, but I had changed so much and was changing by the day. I was changing fast, and not for the better.
And then his door wasn’t unlocked, and he suddenly looked confused, and his eyes grew big and round, and he looked scared and began to rummage through his pockets, but he didn’t have the keys in his trousers, nor in his jacket, perhaps he had left them in Lillestrøm, on a shelf somewhere in Justisen, or he had lost them when he was drunk, wherever he had been drunk, but that he couldn’t remember.
I stepped back a few paces and walked round the house to see if maybe a window had been left open that we could crawl in through, it was a single-storey house, and I could do that, I wasn’t an invalid, but all the windows were closed. My father stood on the steps, almost paralysed, he had no ace up his sleeve. I walked down the footpath staring at the ground all the way down to the postboxes and back up again, and I could see the man from the house next door slowly making his way to the hedge that separated the small plots. I held back for a second, I didn’t like the man, didn’t like his eyes, but then I went over to the hedge anyway. He stopped, the hedge reached up to his crotch and was meticulously trimmed on his side, his half of the hedge, while on my father’s side it was untended and reached up to my waist, it looked stupid, looked petty, and he said:
‘Nice weather we’re having.’
I looked up. The weather had been fine this morning, but right now heavy clouds hung over the countryside.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Is that right,’ he said, and I thought, he is a sly bastard, I know his kind. I can’t deal with that now.
‘They’re in the postbox,’ he said.
‘What,’ I said. ‘In his postbox.’
‘No, in my postbox, the keys, that’s where he put them.’
‘Why didn’t you say that straight away. We’ve been going round looking for them. You saw us.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Why didn’t you put them in his postbox so he could find them.’
‘Why should I.’
‘No, why should you,’ I said, and I turned and walked down to the postboxes, and behind me he muttered, goddamn drunk, why the hell should I, but there were lots of postboxes, not just the two, and down the road there was a whole row of houses one after the other, and the postboxes were all in a line, and the next-door neighbour hadn’t told me what his name was, so I didn’t know which box to look in, and it was the same as always, I had to put my hand in every damn box all the way along before I found the keys, and with my finger through the keyring I went back up, and the man was standing behind the hedge with a broad smile on his face, and I crossed the lawn to the hedge and stopped close to him and said to his face:
‘You prick,’ and he said:
‘Always happy to lend a helping hand,’ and put three fingers to his temple like a Boy Scout, grinned and walked up to his house, and I heard him muttering, goddamn drunk, and I walked towards my father on the doorstep, put the key in the lock and opened the door.
I had never seen anything like it. This was not good. He forced his way past me and kicked the cardboard boxes and rubbish and all sorts of unspeakable things to both sides, clearing a path, and kicked the worn-out, paint-stained shoes at the wall, and the clothes lying on the floor he also kicked away, and they were filthy clothes he hadn’t worn for a long time, and even though his gait was unsteady, there was still a snap to his kick and a good technique, it was a gift from heaven, that kick, or from hell, and also there was an unusually large number of scuffed shoes lying around in the little porch and most of them were old with their tips worn thin, and what was he collecting them for, right inside the door. And everywhere there was rubbish in plastic bags which had never got across the doorstep nor down to the road, and most wasn’t even in a bag but was tossed around, so the floor was covered with litter, and an evil smell drifted in through the open doors of two other rooms, from the bathroom and what must have been the room where he slept with the windows closed, and it was disgusting to think that he could sleep in that room, and the worst was the foul, numbing, ominous stench wafting in from the kitchen, where my father stood by the door waving me in, saying:
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Come in, coffee’s on its way, I’ve put the kettle on, it won’t be long before the water’s hot, I’ve got this really good stove, you know, you can have it like you did when you were small, take off your coat then, oh, it’s elegant, it is, it must have cost serious money, Jesus Christ in Heaven, you can’t deny it,’ and I thought, yes, yes, it did cost serious money, and in fact a good deal of what I owned cost serious money, lots of money, that’s how it had turned out, and most things I bought, they gave me nothing, I just bought them, and now there were two or three of them in every room, there were paintings I never noticed hanging on the walls in the house where I lived alone, and I had the latest fashion in furniture, and antiques, and designer jugs made of glass or steel or both, and blenders, Italian ashtrays, and I didn’t see them, not a single one, and I didn’t use any of them and couldn’t even remember where I had bought them. But I kept my coat on. I was not staying in my father’s house.
I walked through the hall to the kitchen door, past all the debris, and into the kitchen and forced my eyes out of focus and was about to sit down when he said, be careful with that coat, Tommy, and he put a strangely untouched copy of a glossy housekeeping magazine on a stool and spread it open before I sat down.
He had put instant coffee in my cup, and the water was already boiling, it was quick, he was right about that, and then he filled my cup, and the cup could have been cleaner.
‘You’re limping,’ I said, and why on earth did I say that now, it just slipped out, and I could have bitten my tongue off, filled my mouth with pebbles until my teeth crunched, knocked my brain off its stem.
He turned his face away and looked at the wall.
‘I’ve limped for many years. I broke my leg some time in the Seventies, it was. It wouldn’t heal properly afterwards. A car drove into me and I landed in a ditch by Kløfta, and he just drove off, the bastard, he didn’t want to stop, no, he didn’t, he wasn’t bothered about me, I guess I didn’t look smart enough, he was from the inside, you know, from Oslo, that was easy to see, I didn’t get the number of the car or anything. Then I tried to go for help, but it was no good, you see, I couldn’t walk on that leg, no I couldn’t, but I tried, and I guess that’s what caused my problems, walking on that leg, so I’ve limped ever since, I have. That was in the Seventies, round about then, it doesn’t bother me at all,’ he said, but what he said was all nonsense.
I was sitting down now, but he stayed on his feet and wouldn’t sit, and it irritated me, who was in the worse shape, not me, no way, he looked as if he could snap in two at any moment, and then suddenly he smiled, he was a slyboots, he was making up stories, that’s what he did, and I wasn’t expected to believe a word of it, that was the whole point. We both knew why he limped and we had forgotten nothing, repressed nothing, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it, no, that was the trick, instead we would just look at each other with maybe a quick smile on our lips and
share
that knowledge, that memory, as though it was something that was ours together, his and mine, something intimate and violent, a secret, burning bond that held us together, a bond of blood.
Then I stood up. No peace, I thought, nothing that binds us together. I refuse.
IT WAS NEARLY
three in the afternoon. Twice I had driven fifty kilometres north, and fifty kilometres south, also twice, up and down through Upper and Lower Romerike, of all places, a district I never went to any more, I hadn’t been there for many years. Now I was racing along the motorway at a hundred, and then some, on the way to Oslo in my charcoal grey Mercedes, and I thought, how much can a normal weekday in mid-September contain, is time like an empty sack you can stuff any number of things into, does it never go just from here to there, but instead in circles, round and round, so that every single time the wheel has turned, you are back where you started.
But that’s not the way it was. I used to be young. I wasn’t young any more. I would never be young again.
And so for the second time that day I was close to Lillestrøm, which I had left just a couple of hours ago, but this time I had no mission to fulfil there. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go into Oslo city centre where I had my office ten floors up where I worked every single day with money that barely existed, that was liquid and flowing this way and that way at random, or so it seemed to me, and was transparent as water can be transparent, and at other times it was murky as water can be murky, yes, that most of all, and it was hard to see exactly what it was you were doing. And it came to me that I was never going back there. That was a surprising thought. I’ll be damned, I thought. No one could have imagined I would end up in a place like this. Just the idea that I would be sitting by a telephone and a computer shuffling invisible money about and earning a meaningless large sum of money in the process was embarrassing, or confusing when I thought myself back to where I started and all the way up the narrow, slippery rope from childhood to where I was now, at least it had made Jonsen confused. When I sold the mill it left him speechless and sad, but I was convinced I had to, for this I learned in the Eighties, that if you own something of value you will lose money if you don’t sell it. And I didn’t just sell the Kallum Saw Mill, I sold it to our competitor in Valmo, who immediately closed it down so he could rule over our district. I shouldn’t have done that, it changed me, but it was Jonsen himself who told me I had a head for figures. When I was thirty-five he made the mill over to me, I’ve got other things to do, he said, you’ll manage fine, you know how to do everything by now, and you can move it on, he said, much further than I ever could, just use the skills you have, he said, and move it on, but I don’t think he meant to the office block in the centre of Oslo.