Encircling (19 page)
Authors: Carl Frode Tiller
“I’m doing the best I can, Mum,” I say. “I’m sure you are,” she says and I hear what she’s saying and I feel my mouth fall open as I hear her say it and I just sit there looking at her, because I don’t know how she can say such
a thing and I don’t know how she can be so mean to me and I don’t quite know what to say, don’t quite know what to do. Moments pass and there’s silence, then suddenly she starts to cry and it shocks me to see this, I can’t really remember ever seeing Mum cry before, but now suddenly she’s sitting there crying, strong, tough Mum, and I feel a flicker of unease.
There’s silence and this feeling of unease grows inside me, I feel cold all over and I don’t really know what to do, don’t really know what to say, but I get up and go over to her and I lift my hand to stroke her hair, but I don’t do it, I can’t remember ever touching her in that way before and I can’t bring myself to do it. I lower my hand and lay it on her shoulder instead and I feel a wave of revulsion wash over me as I do this, I can’t just stand here like this, so I pat her shoulder lightly, once, then again, then I take my hand away.
“Don’t cry, Mum,” I say, swallowing, and then I just stand there, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say. Then: “I don’t want to be like this Silje,” Mum says and I hear what she’s saying, but I’ve never heard Mum talk like this before, this is serious and the feeling of unease grows and grows. “I get so sick of myself,” she says, and she cries and shakes her head, and her slack cheeks quiver slightly when she shakes her head and the dark bags under her eyes quiver slightly when she shakes her head, I stare at her and there’s silence. I take a breath and let it out again, lift one hand and run it through her hair.
“You spend too much time alone, Mum,” I say, then I walk hesitantly back to the couch, sit back down on the couch and eye her as affectionately as I possibly can. “You ought to get out more often and meet people,” I say and a
couple of moments pass, then Mum wipes away her tears and she stops crying and I look at her, relieved that she’s stopped crying. “Oh, and who would I meet?” she asks, and I hear what she’s saying and I feel even more relieved when I hear her pick up this new strand I’ve introduced. “I don’t know anybody any more,” she says. “They’re all gone,” she’s says. “I’m the only one left,” she says.
“Oh, I’m sure you could make new friends,” I say, giving her a rather tentative smile. “At my age?” she says with a sad little laugh. “Just you wait till you get old and you’ll find out,” she says tartly. I look at her, conscious of feeling relieved that she’s back to normal, and I give her a slightly more affectionate smile. “Tell you what, Mum,” I say, trying to sound more cheerful. “There’s live jazz at one of the cafés in the old town every Wednesday afternoon,” I say. “Why don’t I pick you up tomorrow and take you down there?” I say. “No,” she says, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head. “Why not?” I say. “You’d really enjoy it, I’m sure you would,” I say. “Humph,” she says. “No, Silje,” she says, “I don’t feel like it,” she says, looking crosser and crosser, and I look at her, and I’m conscious of feeling happy and relieved that she’s back to normal. “But you can’t just sit at home alone all the time,” I say. “That’s why you’re feeling so low,” I say. “Stop it, Silje,” she snaps. “Yes, but Mum,” I say, then I pause and she glances off to one side and down at the floor, looking cross and troubled. “Know what?” I say. “When we were in Namsos today, so many good memories came flooding back,” I say. “I know those days are over and that things can never be the way they were,” I say, “but I wish you could call up just a little bit of the person you were when we lived there.”
“As if you’ve any idea who I was,” she says. “As if you know anything at all about what life was like for me back then,” she says, and I stare at her, what’s she on about now? “He could be a proper tyrant sometimes, Silje,” she says. “Tyrannical in a kind way, but a tyrant all the same,” she says, and I hear what she’s saying and for a moment I just sit there looking at her and that feeling of unease is back – I mean, what is all this? “If you only knew,” she says. “You’ve no idea what it was like,” she says. “You’ve no idea what it was like to have no say whatsoever in your own life. You’ve no idea what … he was a … you think he was such a saint, but he … you’ve no idea,” she says, and I hear what she’s saying and unease washes over me and again I go cold all over and I stare at her. This isn’t something she’s blurting out simply because she’s angry and bitter, this is serious, she really means it, but she’s never talked about Dad like this before, and in my mind I see my dad, my dear, sweet dad. “I haven’t missed him,” she says, “not for one second,” then she pauses and she looks straight at me and I look at her and I swallow once, then once more, I can’t take this, it’s too much, and I look at the floor, then up at her again and I try to smile and stay calm.
“Mum,” I say, saying it softly and almost imploringly, and I close my eyes, then I open them again and give her a faint smile, but she won’t let up. “God, how I hated that man,” she says and I hear what she’s saying and my heart beats a little faster, my pulse races a little faster and the unease grows inside me, because I can’t bear to hear this. “Mum!” I say. “That’s enough,” I say, and I blink, blink as steadily as I can, and smile that faint smile. “Enough?” she says. “You’re the one who started going on about how
things were back then,” she says, “so you’ll just have to put up with hearing my version, too.” “No, Mum,” I say, “I don’t have to,” I say. “If you’d known a bit more about what it was like to be married to him you might have understood me a bit better, too,” she says. “Mum,” I say and my heart is beating faster and faster and my pulse is racing faster and faster, but I keep that faint smile on my face and I blink as steadily as I can. “Mum,” I say again, “I’d really rather be spared the intimate details of your marriage,” I say and I smile steadily at her. “I’m your daughter, his and yours.” “But don’t you understand that I need to give you a more nuanced view of your father and me?” she says, never taking her eyes off me. She’s demanding a response from me, but my heart is beating faster and faster and I avoid her gaze, I look this way and that. You don’t understand that …” she says. “Yeah, well go talk to somebody else about these nuances of yours,” I cry, my face twisting into a sneer, and I look her straight in the eye, almost starting at the force of my own aggression. “If it’s that important to you,” I mutter crossly, and I glance sidelong at the floor and there’s silence. “Don’t be silly, Silje,” she says. “I don’t care what other people think or say about me,” she says. “But you, you’re my daughter,” she says and her voice is brittle again, suddenly she’s close to tears again and I look at her and swallow and now I’m close to tears as well. “And it hurts to know that you see me the way you do,” she says. “It hurts, because it’s … unfair!” she says. “You’ve no idea what it was like to be me, all those years,” she says, and then she pauses and I can tell that she’s crying, and I also feel close to tears, but I will not cry, I can’t get into this with her, I won’t have it, can’t handle it. “Do you know how he used to
control me?” she asks. “Don’t you hear what I’m saying,” I cry, a cry that bursts out of me all unbidden, and my voice is both frantic and furious and I stare straight at her and a moment passes. And she looks at me, saying nothing and there’s such sadness in her eyes. I feel a wave of guilt wash over me and I gaze at the floor and I raise my hand, run my hand through my hair, then I look at her and sigh. “Sorry, Mum,” I say. “But,” I say, then I pause and I run my hand through my hair again. “I’m here for you, no matter what,” I say and I hear what I’m saying and I hear that what I’m saying is true. “But I won’t listen to you bad-mouthing Dad,” I add. “I’m his daughter, too,” I say, then I pause, regard her tenderly, try to smile at her. “Mum,” I say, “why don’t we … let’s stop this, both of us,” I say, a note of reconciliation in my voice, and a moment passes, then she sniggers at me. “Yes, why don’t we do that,” she says and suddenly she’s smirking again, and it’s a sad smirk. “Let’s talk about something nice instead,” she says. “The weather or something,” she says. “Mum, please,” I say, eyeing her imploringly, and she looks at me, feigning astonishment. “What?” she says. “Isn’t that what you want?” she says. “Easy and uncomplicated,” she says. “The minute things get a bit difficult you shy away. Over the years that’s how you’ve become,” she says and she looks at me and smirks and I look at the floor and a sigh escapes me and I realize how weary I am, I realize how sick of this I am, and the fridge hums.
Dear David,
I’m sitting here in Mum’s flat, and since I only have these first lines of my letter left to write I’ve made so bold as to open one of the wines she bought in St Emilion in the late Eighties. After listening to her holding forth on everything from soil and temperature averages to viniculture and wine-growing traditions in that particular region of France we were more than keen to sample it, I remember, but because the wine was young and hadn’t yet achieved its full potential, as Mum put it, we had to content ourselves with listening to her detailed and elaborate descriptions and from them gain some impression of how wonderful this wine must be. But it has now achieved its potential and as soon as I’ve put a full stop to this sentence I’m going to switch off my laptop and pour myself a big glass, and as I raise it to my lips and take that first sip, fantasy and imagination will meet reality and then we’ll see which is the stronger of the two.
The first drafts of this letter that I wrote were all attempts to write much in the style of the short stories I produced in the late Eighties, back when we were close friends and
sweethearts; when time was on our side and we were determined to become artists of one sort or another. Since we also acted as each other’s consultant and you read virtually everything I wrote, I had some hope that replicating my writing style from those days would be as effective a way of triggering your memory as descriptions of things we did, people we knew or the world in which we lived. But just as I can imagine Jon would find it hard today to play the bass the way he did when he was eighteen, I found it difficult to write the way I had when I was eighteen, and even when I’ve tried my hardest, even in those passages where I feel I’ve been most successful, my writing has been coloured, both in form and in content, by the life I’ve led since we lost touch. The rawness, the intensity and the passion I had at the age of seventeen or eighteen are gone for ever, or at least: not gone, I sense that I still have all of that in me, but as an academic and almost middle-aged woman (God help me), I no longer have the naivety necessary in order to give rein to it. I feel as though I’ve been consigned to a language that forces me always to have reservations and, as I’m doing now, prove to myself and everyone else that I’ve given great thought to everything I do, say and write. I don’t know when I became like that and I don’t know why I’m like that, but even though I am like that I hope this letter will contain enough imprints, leavings and traces of the Eighties for you to recognize something of that time and follow the trail back, as it were, to the person you were. And in so doing learn more about who you are.
I’ll start with the time when we saw an orange Audi 80:
You were hungry, and since I lived closest, we popped into my house so you could grab a sandwich before we went
to the cinema. Mum was at the Arts Centre and I thought I had the place to myself, but I’d forgotten that my gran was coming to visit and when we walked in she was in the kitchen, having a footbath and reading the local paper. Her white old-lady legs stuck up out of the lead-grey zinc basin like spindly flower-stalks in a vase and her long, lank hair hung down over her shoulders. She smiled cheerily when she saw me, but for some reason I was overcome by embarrassment, and no matter how fond I was of her, no matter how proud I was of her, I couldn’t bear the thought of you seeing her, so I turned on my heel and pushed you gently but firmly back down the hall, trying all the while to come up with some excuse to give you later.
But there was no need, because once we were back out on the front step something happened that made us forget all about the sandwich and the rude way I had stopped you from entering the house. On the other side of the street, parked next to the telephone box with its engine running was an orange Audi 80. Through the half-open window on the driver’s side we saw a woman in her early forties light a cigarette, flick the match out of the window, glance in the mirror and pull slowly out onto the road. Initially I thought it was the way she had inhaled, drawing so deeply on the cigarette, hollowing her cheeks and causing her eyes to bulge slightly, that made her look like the panic-stricken figure in Munch’s
The Scream
, but when her face still looked the same even after the coil of smoke had left her gaping mouth I realized that she actually was panic-stricken. At first I thought she must have spotted something shocking happening behind us, that our house was on fire, or that a plane was about to crash into the estate, or whatever. But when I spun round to look, my heart already pounding, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. I promptly
turned round again only to discover that it was you she was staring at. She didn’t stop or slow down, but as the car rolled slowly past, she kept looking further and further back over her shoulder, straining not to lose sight of you, and only once she was almost on the bend and a car pulling out from the right had to beep its horn to warn her to stop and give way did she turn to face the front.
We stood perfectly still on the steps, staring after her until the car had disappeared around the bend and she was gone forever. When I asked you who on earth this woman was you told me you had no idea, that you’d ever seen her before in your life, and this moved me to remark – off the top of my head and with a little laugh – that it might have been someone who had seen your dad in you (your mother never revealed who your father was, not to you or to anyone else). “Yeah, maybe,” was all you said, and then you laughed.
Gradually, over the next few seconds, it began to dawn on me that what I had said was not, however, altogether out of the question and when I saw how your eyes changed as this dawned on you too, I realized that the longing to find your real father was stronger than you had ever let on. But when I asked you what you were thinking, you simply shrugged and said you weren’t thinking of anything special, and when I held your gaze to somehow show you that I knew you weren’t telling the truth, you raised your eyebrows and looked quizzical, and that was enough to stop me asking any more questions.
My gran was every bit as blithe and cheery when I popped back into the kitchen moments later to get you something to eat, and even though she must have known that I had pushed you out of the house because I was embarrassed by her, she never said a word about it, neither then nor later. Dear, wise Gran. For some reason, whenever I thought of her
I pictured a little tree stump, and when I told you this you said you knew exactly what I meant, only then to add: “You can always count on a stump.” I remember thinking this was an odd, but lovely, thing to say.
The time when we ran away from Jon:
We thought Jon was taking a rest before the party and we only meant to give him a bit of a fright, but we never got that far because the sight that met us when we climbed up onto the stack of timber, popped our heads over the windowsill and perched there like roosting chickens, peering into his room, was so at odds with what we had expected to see that we simply forgot everything else and fell into a weird, open-mouthed trance.
Stark-naked and glistening with sweat, he was hunched over the big, brown double bass, like a weary drunk draped round the shoulders of his boozing buddy. The room was filled with a rich, low, dark, vibrant note that went on and on, a note that for some reason I sometimes find myself remembering when I drink red wine from Rioja. His eyes were closed and his hand hovered over the quivering string like the talon of a bird of prey, stiff, his index finger sticking out slightly, all set to pluck again. But he didn’t pluck, he let the note die away completely, holding a pause that seemed to chisel a trench in the music, and we stood there on the green-tinged, rain-soaked and somewhat slippery stack of timber, rigid and motionless.
Had I been as much of a romantic as my husband thinks and says I am, I could have embellished the truth a bit and said that we climbed quietly down from the stack of timber, that we made our way thoughtfully out of the garden and
round to the front door, and that I said something “nice” before we rang the bell: that we didn’t need to tell Jon we had seen him or, even “nicer”, that Jon was going to be a great musician some day (which seemed, in a way, quite likely).
But I’m not as bad as my husband thinks. We stood stock still atop the timber for a while longer and then, after exchanging glances and a quick grin, I slid a hand under the windowframe and very gently tipped the window up just far enough for us to slip our heads under it, place our elbows on the sill and lean into the room.
We didn’t say a word. Not even when, after some moments, Jon noticed us and his normally pale face turned bright red. We merely hung there staring straight at him, bursting with laughter. And by the time he closed the curtains with a sharp tug (so the contours of our faces must have shown clearly through the filmy, but opaque fabric), when still not a word had been said, by us or by him, it was hard to say anything at all. We did our best not to laugh out loud as we walked round the house to the front door, but we couldn’t stop ourselves and he was mad as hell when we walked in. You had to spend half an hour soft-soaping him and coaxing him before he would come to the party, because suddenly that wasn’t so important any more, and no sooner had we got there than he wanted to go home again, but when he said this, much to his dismay you merely shrugged and said “fair enough”.
He didn’t leave, of course. Instead he got drunk and became a real pain in the ass and when we were heading home in the early hours and he had to pee, we didn’t stop and wait for him, we just kept walking, and once round the bend and out of sight we left the path and ducked into a grove of birch trees, their branches already thick with new leaf. It was rather like walking through a green waterfall, and I distinctly remember
thinking of some film in which two lovers do just that, possibly
The Blue Lagoon
which had been one of my favourite films a few years earlier. When we emerged on the other side you put a finger to your lips and said, “Shh,” and a moment later we heard Jon go stumbling and mumbling by, looking and sounding as funny as a drunk man in some crappy comedy. A moment later he started calling our names, softly at first, then louder and eventually with anger and a touch of desperation in his voice. “He doesn’t how to get home,” you whispered to me.
I don’t remember ever feeling bad that we weren’t always nice to Jon, and I don’t think you did either. Quite the opposite, really. Jon was so self-centred and so full of self-pity sometimes that we felt it was all he deserved. And besides, he was such a wimp, so pathetic and helpless when it came to anything but music that it annoyed us and got our backs up, and we felt it served him right when we, or usually I, disregarded his touchiness and told him straight out that he had to get a grip. We even took a sort of pleasure in asking him to do things we knew he didn’t dare to do, or thought were beyond him: anything physical, for example, or going up and speaking to strangers, not because we were bad people and loved to see him screw up, but because it was as much laziness as lack of ability that caused him to balk at even trying, and because it pissed us off the way he took it for granted that we would take care of all the things he didn’t feel up to doing.
The reason why, even so, Jon hung around with us as much as he did and why, in spite of everything, he fitted in, was simply that he was the sort of person you might come upon playing the double bass stark-naked (paradoxically, perhaps, considering that we laughed at the sight of him). I don’t know whether this nude bass playing was one of his countless experiments or whether he had simply come out of
the shower and been so overcome by the sudden urge to play that he forgot to get dressed first, but the very fact that he did what he did, stone-cold sober and not in any attempt to seem “crazy” to anyone (as would have been the case if one of the other boys in our class had pulled a similar stunt) was nonetheless one of many signs that he possessed the same uncompromising passion and commitment that I remember you and I possessing back then.
Like all other kids our age we may at times have tended to affect a certain nonchalance and apathy, but unlike a lot of other people, especially the girls I knew and hung around with sometimes, I think it’s fair to say that we had a gift for immersing ourselves totally in things and actually believing that what one does really matters. When we wrote stories, when we wrote and played music or produced one of our sometimes rather obscure art projects, we could keep at it for hours on end without a thought for food or rest or whatever else we had to do and we worked with a concentration and an intensity so profound that, sometimes at any rate, we attained that glorious state of mind in which you lose yourself completely in something else, something bigger. These days it’s very rare for me to become immersed in anything. Writing the first sections of this letter is actually the closest I’ve come in a long time to being totally immersed.
The first time we shagged:
The first thing we noticed was that something had startled the birds. They flew up in a flurry from the branches on which they’d been perching, much like a handful of sand and grit flung into the air by a toddler in a sand box. One, possibly two, seconds later we heard a kind of rumbling
noise that swelled in a fraction of second into a deep, dark booming. When we looked round to see what was happening, my eyes were forced shut, I felt my fringe lift slightly and the skin of my face seemed to draw back and sit more tightly over my skull.
Looking back on it now, that one second in my life was not unlike standing at the side of the road when a trailer truck thunders past and the back draught hits you so hard that it almost blows you off your feet. But we weren’t standing by the side of the road, we were in the middle of a grove of trees, each clutching a bunch of wood anemones (it was my gran’s eighty-fifth birthday the next day and I had promised to help with the table decorations) and what we saw rushing towards us was quite clearly not a trailer truck, it was what was to become known as the Holseth Landslide.