Authors: John Baker
Second, he was wearing glasses. Thick plastic frames, looked too heavy for his head, as if they’d forced his chin into his chest. Sam didn’t wear glasses. Hell, he was a past master at refusing to see the things that were staring him in the face, but he didn’t need specs.
And third, the body language was wrong. This guy had let the world get to him, you could see there’d been a significant moment in his life when he’d thrown in the towel and he was replaying it every moment that followed. He was a man in a constant act of surrender. That didn’t tally with Sam Turner. Sam was the guy who never gave up. Capitulation wasn’t part of his act. You could chop his arms and legs off and he’d come at you with his head.
So everything was wrong. But Geordie smiled and went over to him. Sam kept his eyes down, didn’t crack his face for a second. The closer he got, the more Geordie could see there was Sam Turner, or at least a shadow of him, hidden deep in the folds of this derelict propping up the kiosk in Oslo’s Sentral Stasjon.
‘How you doing?’ Geordie asked.
Sam adjusted his spectacles. He shook his head. ‘What’s with watching me trying to find you?’ Geordie said. ‘How long was I supposed to wait before you would’ve let on?’
‘I wanted to make sure you weren’t being followed,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t want Interpol scooping me up before I’ve sorted out what’s going on.’
‘OK, that I can accept. I thought you was testing me. Trying to improve my powers of observation.’
‘That, too,’ Sam said. ‘I wondered how many times you’d look at me before you saw who I was.’
‘That’s a crap thing to do, Sam. I wouldn’t do that to you.’
‘I didn’t plan on doing it, either. But once it started I got into the mood. It was like a game.’
‘Yeah, a game where you’re the only one knows the rules. I’m a stranger in a strange land and wondering if I’ve been dumped or landed in the wrong country and you’re playing silly buggers.’
Sam took a step towards the exit and Geordie followed. Sam said, ‘I knew you’d see the funny side of it, accept it in the right spirit. Somebody else, a guy with no sense of humour, might have taken it completely wrong. I could have ended up with you giving me a row for it.’
Geordie followed him out of the station to the side of the road. Everything was moving too fast. There was a huge bronze tiger prowling the cobblestone square outside the station. Size of a small elephant. And cold. You could feel the temperature; as you breathed in the air chilled your chest. Traffic zooming around, every last one of the cars and trucks on the wrong side of the road. He touched Sam’s shoulder. ‘We could go back in the station,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on the train and get off, try to do the whole thing over again but get it right.’
‘You mean, me get it right?’
‘No, both of us get it right.’
‘OK,’ Sam said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m under pressure.’ Geordie offered his hand. ‘I’m sorry, too,’ he said. ‘I’m under pressure as well.’
Sam took his hand and shook it. He opened the door of the taxi that had stopped for them and whispered to Geordie before he got in, ‘Watch what you say while we’re driving. Norwegians understand English better than we do.’
Sam asked the driver to take them to Storgata and Geordie kept mum and watched the city. New buildings, old buildings, some attempt at symmetry by successive generations of architects. The area around the station was the same as in any big city: cosmopolitan, busy with the usual sprinkling of dropouts and dopers, street-girls with hollow eyes wearing short skirts and lipstick among the shoppers and office-workers. Indians and Pakistanis and black Africans with stalls on the pavements and bluehaired ladies with kid-gloves, seemingly oblivious to change, laden with parcels from GlasMagasinet and Steen & Strom.
Every other street there was a glance of the harbour with Stena, Fjord and Colour line ships tied at the quay waiting for their passengers to Copenhagen, Kiel and Gothenburg. Geordie had never been here before but it wasn’t as strange as he’d feared. He saw two different McDonald’s within five minutes. Much of Oslo was instantly recognizable. It was like one of the bigger English cities after a clean-up but with more wealth and style thrown in.
Trams and tramlines ran along the major arteries and every once in a while the taxi shuddered as it crossed them or hit a cobbled area of the street.
The car left them in a street off Torgata with three- and four-storey flats on each side. Geordie read the street name aloud: ‘Osterhaus gate.’
‘The
e
isn’t silent,’ Sam said.
‘Osterhaus gate?’
‘Yeah. Pretty close.’
Geordie mouthed it again to himself. He looked around him. ‘Like Russia,’ he said.
‘You been to Russia?’
‘Never.’
Sam gave him the long sad-bastard look which he’d been practising most of his life. Used to do it with a shake of the head for emphasis but these days he’d pared it down to a minimalist incarnation. No shake of the head, no movement of facial muscles; it was all in the eyes. Less is more.
‘But it’s the twenty-first century, Sam. We’ve invented picture books, you know, cameras? There’s this new invention called TV, still being developed at the moment, under-funded and the technology’s primitive but if it takes off, well, we’ll be able to sit at home and watch people in other countries doing all their foreign stuff right in front of us. Janet reckons we could have a big TV set in our sitting room and me and her and Echo, we’ll be sitting in front of it with Chinese take-aways and there’ll be satellites up in the sky so we can beam down to any country in the world. Watch the Olympic games or the latest war in the Middle East.’
‘You finished?’ Sam asked.
“Course, you being so advanced in years, you might not be around when they’ve finished tweaking the technology. But it’s coming. It’s on the way.
‘Her grandma, Janet’s mother, she bought a picture book for Echo and it’s got a couple of photographs of St Petersburg in there. Something about the style of architecture, the feel of it, and then when we got out of the taxi and we’re in this street I wouldn’t be surprised to see a
Droshki
come along or a young Cossack in high boots.
‘So what’s happening is I’m making associations. I’ve just arrived in a foreign country and my identity, the guy who I think I am, is out of his depth. I’m looking around and trying to make sense of what’s around me. I’m comparing these new things with the old things that are part of my experience. I’m not fully in control of the situation yet. I might never be. But as long as I’m drawing breath there’ll be a part of me which is weighing and calculating and judging my relationship to the world.’
Sam opened a door and stepped into the vestibule of a block of flats. He took the stairs two at a time. Geordie followed.
‘You finished now?’ Sam asked.
‘If you’ve finished giving me the sad-bastard stare.’
‘I got it wrong again.’
‘At least you’re admitting it,’ Geordie said. ‘Usually takes you a month or two to see where you went wrong. Sometimes a year.’
Sam stopped on the third landing and inserted a key in the lock of flat number 34. The door opened inwards and he stepped inside. Geordie followed and closed the door behind him. They stood facing each other in a tiny entrance passage. ‘Give me some leeway here,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve been living inside my head the last few days.’ He avoided eye-contact. ‘Angeles?’ he said. ‘She all right? You seen her?’
There was the crack in his voice, the hint of vulnerability that came to the surface so infrequently it was always a surprise.
Geordie dropped his bag and threw his arms around Sam. He held him close. Sam tried to return the hug but his arms were trapped by his sides. Geordie could feel Sam’s new beard tickling the side of his neck. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to worry. Everyone’s looking after her.’
They let each other go and stood back. The eye-contact was there now. ‘We’ll get the bastard,’ Geordie said. ‘It looks bleak at the moment but we’ll come through the other end. Whoever’s setting this up, he’s not gonna get away with it.’
Sam served up something called
Fiske Boiler.
Seemed to be white fish and flour pulped and tossed around in a frying pan. Frozen fries with that which he’d cooked in the oven until they were almost warm. No pudding. Geordie reflected on the stark reality of his situation. No Janet or Echo, no decent cooking unless he did it himself and got lucky. Sam the man still fighting but looking low and verging on something not many miles from depression.
Geordie could understand that. The guy had lost an ex-wife and an old girlfriend and was hoping he wouldn’t lose anyone else. What must that be like? Geordie didn’t have ex-wives of his own to compare it with, only one exgirlfriend. He could only imagine what it would be like if he and Janet got divorced and then some years later he discovered that somebody had murdered her and made it look like he, Geordie, had done the deed.
But his thoughts didn’t lead to empathy with Sam. First he couldn’t imagine Janet and him being divorced. Sure, lots of people got divorced but still, they weren’t the same as him and Janet. Him and Janet, they were serious. What they had together was so much better than what either of them had had before, better than they could have dreamed. Geordie had thought he’d always be an orphan. He didn’t imagine himself living in a house until Sam came along, much less meeting Janet and getting a house and a garden and having cats and a dog which didn’t fight and neighbours and then Echo being born.
How could he get divorced from all that? Go right back to Go? He’d never get to the bit where Janet was murdered and the murderer tried to make it look like Geordie’d done it. He’d be out of it, mad or dead or both. He wouldn’t still be around like Sam, the ultimate survivor, rocking around in the debris of his past lives.
‘What does it feel like?’ he asked when he’d finished pushing the cold fries about his plate.
Sam shook his head. Stared at the black space of the triple-glazed window. ‘There’s guilt mixed up in there,’ he said. ‘Which is never helpful. There’s all the shit about gender as well, being the male, the protector.’
‘Come on, Sam.’
‘I know.’ He held his hands up. ‘I know the score with all that stuff. I’m not inviting it in but it’s part of the cultural bag. It’s like nationalism, military music... I don’t believe in it but I took it in with my mother’s milk. Whatever I do with it, however much I rationalize it, it’s still there. I think it’s gone, I tell myself I’ve overcome it, but there’s traces of it in my blood and sometimes they all flow together. It’s like a shadow that starts to take on substance.’
Geordie had talked to Celia about that. About how the past sometimes came together like a great weight and dragged you down and Celia had said it wasn’t just the past, it could take any form because it was the devil. And the devil always came for you when you were weak.
‘I can’t believe Nicole is dead,’ Sam continued. ‘It was different with her. I’d still not let go. I don’t mean there was anything between us. She was married and I’m sure she never thought of me. I only thought of her a couple of times a year. But she was still there, in my memory. There were things we’d never reconciled.’
Sam had stopped drinking for Nicole so many times he’d lost count. He’d watched her thrown against the gnarled reef of his inadequacy and deception until her being couldn’t take any more. That afternoon she’d left to live with Rolf Day, the phenomenologist, Sam had been drinking since before dawn. She came into his den and turned the sound of Dylan’s ‘St Augustine’ down one notch. Sam turned it up two. He sprawled at the table, a bottle in each hand. His eyes were like separate shrieks, blind and dwarfing his already shrivelled face. ‘I’m going,’ she said. Must’ve been summer because she was wearing a silk blouse with no sleeves. Plum-coloured. Her arms were thin, just bones covered with skin. Her face was hollow, high cheekbones protruding. Her freshly washed hair and the palpable relief in her statement were barely enough to dispel the association with a skeleton.
‘It’s not just you being punished here, Sam,’ she told him. ‘You’re trying to bring the whole world down with you.’
For an instant he’d seen her as a cadaver and then he’d remembered her as she was when they first met. He saw what had happened to her in that house with him. There must have been a choice in that moment, he told himself later. He could have wept or he could have held out a hand to her or told her goodbye with a shake of his head. He could have made more promises.
What he did was to take another swig from one of his bottles and sit back in the chair with fiery breath. He laughed at her, a deep throaty roar of male pride and complacency. And as she backed out of the room and turned to stumble along the hall to freedom and independence he dug his finger-nails into the wood of the table and hooted and honked and shook long after the house had fallen silent and consciousness had drifted beyond his grasp.
It was midnight in Oslo and Sam didn’t want to leave the flat because he still had some thinking to do so Geordie walked outside by himself. There was graffiti everywhere in Osterhaus gate, graffiti in English and Norwegian and Arabic, other languages that Geordie could only guess at. Tamil, maybe, if that was a language? Urdu? Russian? On the corner of the street was Hornaas Musikk, windows crammed with guitars and banjos, piano accordions and mandolins. In Storgata he peered through the windows of the Mai Vietnamesisk restaurant, looking in at the faces around the tables and wondering at the dishes of food and the glasses of alcohol. Maybe Sam was right again, it wasn’t at all like Russia.