Encircling (15 page)

I tried to console myself with the thought that she would have done more to cover up her moves toward Samuel if my suspicions were well-founded, that it was so blatant made it seem less than likely. But it was never long before jealousy and
suspicion would come creeping back; it had got to the point where they had thrown caution to the winds, I told myself, it had got to the point where they could no longer control it themselves. Oh, that was a terrible time, David, I was so desperate, in such agony and torment.

For all that you were so keen on the arts yourself, you only sneered at Mum’s sudden interest in books. As a teenager you were bound, of course, to scoff at and reject anything Mum and I liked, and you rolled your eyes at Isabel Allende, denouncing her writing as a load of Latin American claptrap. Bach was good, obviously, you allowed, a genius, but you couldn’t refrain from adding that that particular recording of the
Brandenburg Concertos
wasn’t rated all that highly. You rarely listened to classical music, as far as I knew, but you made it sound as though you were an expert on Bach and both Mum and I realized that you must have looked this up in some book or other after she bought the CD. We didn’t say anything, though, we had sense enough to know that you needed us to rebel against. Indeed for a long time I also let you think that we differed more in our personalities and opinions than we actually did, reluctant as I was to interfere with what I saw as a natural youthful rebellion. When you played music that I in actual fact thought was pretty good, I would shake my head and mutter “What a racket”, and when we were discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict I tended to make myself sound more pro-Israeli than I actually was.

But there came a point when your youthful rebellion became so extreme that there was no need for any of that sort of play-acting on my part. The gap between you on the one hand and Mum and I on the other became stark reality,
so to speak. We might have commented on and been critical of the pessimistic view of life that you and Jon and Silje had adopted, and we might have sighed in frustration at the attendant unhealthy and somewhat decadent lifestyle, but it wasn’t until you began to build up a small collection of bones and teeth that it came to a confrontation of sorts. When Mum was making brawn for Christmas, you retrieved the pig’s head from the bin and took it up to your room. When you and Jon came across the carcass of an elk in the forest you filled your rucksacks with the bones and brought them home and once, when you had gone sea fishing with a neighbour, you came back with the jaw of a catfish and the feathery backbone of a large skate that the two of you had filleted. Slowly but surely, what had once been a boy’s room with posters of rock bands on the walls was transformed into something resembling a place of sacrifice where you and Silje and Jon would sit in the glow of the candles you had set in tall candelabra, listening to dirge-like chants and talking late into the night. At first your mum thought your collection of bones represented a revolt against me, a man of the church, and she was furious on my behalf, lambasted you for not appreciating all I had done for you. I remember being surprised by the ferocity of her outburst, and although I have to admit I was pleased to hear her defending me and showing concern for me at a time when I was frightened of losing her to Samuel, I had to take her aside and try to calm her down. She was not readily pacified, though, and it did not get any easier, she grew more and more fretful until it got to the stage where she became overprotective of you, she started setting unreasonable limits for when you should be home in the evenings, what you were allowed to read or watch on television and so on. Naturally everyone thought
that I was behind this, that this was the stern, finger-wagging vicar trying to keep his stepson on the straight and narrow, but it really wasn’t. I backed Berit to the hilt and sided with her in any discussion or row with you, of course I did, this was a firm rule with us, but more and more often when I was alone with her I found myself criticizing her for going too far, for being too hard on you. I told her she didn’t need to be so afraid of letting you go, that we had instilled you with good solid attitudes and values and that you would be fine, this was simply a perfectly normal teenage rebellion. But she wouldn’t listen to me. She was convinced that Jon and Silje were a bad influence on you. There was something wrong with you she said, she could tell, you were moody and sullen and she also felt that you had grown cynical and apathetic. You no longer went by the rules and the limits we set and you didn’t seem to care. “Be back by eleven,” she would say, “it’s a normal school day tomorrow.” “Okay,” you would say and then come trailing in at half-past two. “It’s like I don’t exist,” she said to me, “he’s lost his way and I feel so helpless.”

Then one day something happened that made me feel just as uneasy. We had always been at pains to respect your privacy, we never opened drawers or cupboards where you were likely to keep things you didn’t want us to see, but on this particular day Mum accidentally bumped that set of little drawers on top of your desk with a mop, knocking it onto the floor. Several of the drawers fell open and their contents spilled out onto the floor. In one of the drawers was a small plastic bag with a label on it which said something like: “roughly two and half kilos of the person I am at any given time is dead skin. Here is a little bit of the person I was on 14/6/1987” and next to this lay some flakes of shed skin, probably from the soles of your feet. In another drawer lay a bag with a label saying,
“not a single tiny molecule is left of the person I was about nine years ago, not a single tiny molecule of the person I am now will be a part of me nine years from now. Here is a little bit of the person I was on 29/9/1987”, and inside were some of your toe- and fingernail clippings. And so it went on, you had kept locks of hair, eyebrow hairs, beard stubble, pubic hair and clumps of reddish-brown earwax, all packed in small, clear plastic bags bearing yellow labels, on each of which you had written a line or two.

It was almost like being in a thriller movie, to suddenly come upon this. Like being in the sort of revelatory scene in which some character turns out to be not at all who you thought they were, and if we weren’t exactly in a state of shock our faces were certainly pale and grave as we stood there reading the various labels. Neither of us said anything straight away, we even shrank from meeting each other’s eyes, I don’t quite know why, possibly because deep down we did not want to accept what was happening to you, and because we knew that the anxiety in the other’s eyes would make it impossible for us to tell ourselves that everything was really all right.

From then on Mum was convinced that you were mentally ill and she found it impossible to stay calm when we raised the matter with you. She swung between begging you to seek help and threatening all sorts of sanctions if you didn’t. We wouldn’t give you the money for driving lessons as we had promised we would, she said, and there was no way you would be allowed to go to Denmark for the Roskilde Festival. “But why is it worse for me to stick some locks of my own hair in a plastic bag than for you to stick them in a photo album?” you asked. “I mean, it comes to the same thing.” “Oh, but David – toenails?” Mum cried. “Why is saving toenails worse than saving hair?” you asked. “They’re both leavings from
my own body, they’re both reminders of the person I was at a certain point in time.”

I couldn’t help it, I thought you put your case very well and you were so relaxed and sensible in the face of all this that I felt much easier in my mind after this conversation. Later I would find myself thinking that at that moment I was on the verge of being sucked into your universe, that the limits for what I defined as normal were being pushed out further and further and that I was simply coming to accept more and more of who you were. But I was still concerned enough to accompany Mum when she insisted on going to see Jon’s and Silje’s mothers, to discuss the situation and discover whether there was anything they could do before things went seriously wrong.

Grete, Jon’s mother, didn’t seem particularly upset by what Mum told her, although she pretended to be: “What are you saying?” she asked, feigning shock. “Oh, no, now you’ve got me worried,” she said, but she was only saying it because she thought that was what we expected her to say, as I realized when I saw what passed between her and Jon’s brother, who was sitting in the background with a barely concealed grin on his face. Just when Mum was at her most distraught I noticed him and his mother exchange a glance and I saw Grete struggling not to laugh. They evidently thought Mum was hysterical and rather than being alarmed they actually seemed to be enjoying the whole business. Not long after this, the catechist told me that he had overheard Grete in a café in town, declaring to her women friends that you were “going to pot,” as she put it. In an attempt to appear concerned and responsible she had said that she was going to do everything she could to keep you away from Jon in future, but most of her talk was about Mum: “Seems life isn’t all a bed of roses for that
Berit, even if she did marry the vicar,” she had said. “They’re actually no better than us, no matter what they might think.”

Oddrun Schiive, Silje’s mother, wasn’t worried by what we had to say either, quite the reverse. “But that’s great,” she said when we told her what we had found in your drawers. “If you ask me, you should be proud to have a son who doesn’t want to be one of the common herd, I’m certainly proud of Silje for being able to think for herself and daring to do so,” she said. Well, we might have guessed she’d say that, she was known after all for presenting herself as the artistic sort with alternative views on everything and anything. For example, when asked she always said that she worked in the arts, when in fact she had a job in the Arts Centre café, and apart from selling art posters and tickets at the various events at the centre there was no difference between that and waitressing in the café at the local department store or shopping centre. Rumour also had it that her interest in the arts was really just a front, that it was part of an act designed to render her drinking more respectable and a little less shameful. “As if it’s somehow more acceptable to swan around with bleary eyes and flushed, puffy cheeks if you’re a Bohemian doing something in the arts than if you’re an ordinary working woman waiting tables in a café,” as the catechist remarked.

Actually, all the partying that went on in that house was one of the reasons why Mum and I were not happy about you spending so much time there. It was one thing to go to parties with kids of your own age – not that we were all that happy about that either, but we accepted it as long as it didn’t get out of hand and didn’t happen too often – but drinking with Silje’s mother and her raggle-taggle bunch of friends weekend after weekend was a very different matter. Mum knew most of the people who frequented that house and according to her
they were a sorry shower of middle-aged men, all of whom had at one time dreamed of being musicians, painters or writers, but had wound up as drunken youth workers or supply teachers in Norwegian and music who probably felt younger and less like failures when dispensing their so-called wisdom to you and Jon and Silje.

But all the partying with Oddrun and all those men with potbellies and grey ponytails was just part of it. What dismayed Mum most and also caused me to become seriously worried were the changes in your behaviour. You became more and more moody, you weren’t your old cheery self, never animated and eager, although you could still show passion and enthusiasm, but always in a rather grim, resentful way. Even more disturbing was the way you and Silje and Jon had begun to isolate yourselves. Previously, the three of you had at least had some contact with other young people, but now it seemed to be you three and you three only, hardly anyone else ever phoned you and if anyone did you lied and said you were busy, or you asked us to say that you weren’t home; you couldn’t be bothered talking about football and females and how plastered this person or that had been at the last party, you said, your old pals bored you.

We tried to talk to you about this, but it got us nowhere, which was probably as much our fault us yours. Mum was so distraught that she simply could not contain herself. She may not have got hysterical, not exactly, but it still always ended in tears, entreaties and threats, all of which merely defeated the whole purpose, of course. You responded by sighing and asking if she was about done, which only made her even more frantic and upset and such sessions usually concluded with you getting up and walking out. We had always been able to talk to one another, you and I, we were quite alike,
both of us thinkers, and I believe you appreciated the fact that I treated you like an adult and didn’t try to act young when we had a conversation. Well, I had seen where that approach got you. Samuel didn’t realize, you see, that there were certain unwritten rules concerning who could and who could not use words like “dig” and “cool” and “awesome”. He thought that by talking like this he could become one of the gang, be accepted by the kids in his confirmation classes and the Ten Sing choir and he couldn’t understand why he met with contempt, why the kids laughed at him behind his back.

But even though I kept a cooler head than your mum and even though I treated you like an adult, I still couldn’t get through to you. Maybe I behaved too much like a psychotherapist or a psychologist in my efforts to understand what was going on in your head, maybe you found the whole situation too unnatural and stupid, maybe you felt there was too little conversation and too much questioning and maybe that, in turn, made you feel like a little boy and not like the young, independent man you so wanted to be. Maybe you found it humiliating and hurtful, I don’t know. At any rate you would sit there yawning and looking at the clock, making a big show of not being interested, and afterwards Mum and I would be as worried and confused as we had been before we spoke to you.