Encircling (4 page)
Authors: Carl Frode Tiller
“Well, do you want to come in and join the rest of us?” he asks. “Or were you planning on having another forty winks?”
Annoyance grows inside me, I feel my whole body being filled with a fierce resentment, but I don’t let it show, pretend not to notice the wry note in his voice, the sarcasm.
“Be right with you,” I say, rubbing my eye, as if rubbing the sleep out of it, then I get up. He nods and grins, then turns on his heel and walks off. I wait a couple of seconds, then I bend down, pick up the blanket and shake off the fresh grass cuttings, bundle it up, tuck it under my arm and follow him, taking care to walk a little more slowly than him, I just can’t face talking to him on the way in. I walk a few yards, then stop and make a show of having stepped on something, lift one of my feet and make a face, stand on one foot and feel under my heel, stay like this until Eskil has disappeared through the veranda door, then I start walking again, force my feet across the lawn and up onto the veranda, my resentment growing and growing, but there’s no way round it. I step across the creaking veranda floor and into the living room, stop short just inside. I can hear Mum’s laughter in the kitchen, closely followed by Eskil’s pompous laugh, a laugh that drowns out everything else. A moment, then Eskil says something, I don’t quite catch it, but Mum hoots with laughter and calls him a big idiot. Everything’s as it should be: Eskil being entertaining in his usual smug fashion and Mum laughing at everything he says and does. I feel my mood growing more and more sour, I can’t face going in there and joining them, can’t face having to stand there and act as though I find Eskil as witty and entertaining as he’s trying to be.
Then: “Hi, Jon.”
I look round. And there’s Hilde, with a pack of Marlboro Lights in her hand. She gives me a friendly smile. She’s always friendly, Hilde, I don’t know how the hell Eskil ever managed to snare her, don’t know how she puts up with him either, he certainly doesn’t deserve her.
“Hi,” I say, and I walk over to her, lay a hand on her bare, tanned arm, just next to her tattoo, she has a tattoo of some Asian symbol on her upper arm. “Long time, no see,” I say and give her a hug.
“I know,” she says. “Last time I saw you was at Grete’s sixtieth birthday party.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. It’s a long time since I’ve been that drunk,” I say with a little laugh.
She doesn’t laugh, looks straight at me and smiles kind of hesitantly, a strange little smile, as though she feels sorry for me, I don’t see why she should feel sorry for me, but that’s how it looks, as if I’d done something at Mum’s sixtieth birthday party, as if I’d made a fool of myself or something, I don’t remember making a fool of myself, but it’s possible, I suppose, I was so fucking plastered. But don’t think about that right now, it can’t have been that bad if nobody’s mentioned it.
“So, how’re you doing?” I say.
“Oh, fine,” she says, looking at me and smiling, smiling a perfectly ordinary smile now. “Great!” she says. “And you?”
“Yeah, I’m doing just great!” I say, trying to sound reasonably upbeat, give her a smile.
Two seconds.
Then: “And the band?” I hear Eskil say.
I turn. He saunters over to us, his sunglasses still pushed up onto his brow. He looks at me and grins.
“How’s it going with the band?” he asks again, blinking lazily, seeming to radiate self-assurance, calm.
“Oh, great!” I say, trying to smile back at him. “We’re hard at it!”
He nods, waits a moment.
“You’re not getting a bit too old for all that?” he asks.
“Too old?”
“To go around dreaming of becoming a pop star,” he says.
“Yeah, well I don’t actually dream of becoming a pop star,” I say, feeling another surge of annoyance, but I keep smiling.
“Oh, no, that’s right,” he says. “You’re an artist!”
I look at him, feel like firing off an equally sarcastic retort, but I can’t bring myself to do it, don’t feel like starting anything, no good would come of it anyway. So instead I look at him and chuckle, pretend to take it as a joke, pretend not to hear the sarcasm in his voice. Turn to Hilde, look at her and smile, but she doesn’t look at me, just stands there smacking her lips, giving Eskil a look that says: behave yourself. Her eyelids droop pointedly, as if to let him know she’s had enough of him.
“Is something wrong?” Eskil asks. He raises his eyebrows, puts on a butter-wouldn’t-melt face.
“No, no,” Hilde says.
“But you look so tired!”
She doesn’t say anything, simply looks him straight in the eye.
“You’re sure there’s nothing wrong?” Eskil asks again.
“There’s never anything wrong,” Hilde says.
“Gosh!” Eskil exclaims.
“Yes, I know!” she says.
I bend down and pretend to be picking at a tiny spot on my shorts, rather relishing the fact that they’re
arguing, although I feel a bit awkward, too, it’s kind of embarrassing. One beat, then I act as if I’ve suddenly thought of something I meant to ask Mum. “Um,” I say, scratching my chin as I start to walk off, walk across the living room and into the kitchen. Mum is standing with her back to me, at the cooker, stirring the sauce. She turns and looks at me, smiles, carrying on as though everything from this morning is forgotten, she’s like a changed woman now Eskil’s here, no longer so down, she’s never down when Eskil’s around, she’s almost cheerful.
“Thanks for mowing the lawn for me, Jon,” she says. Turns away again, stirs. I study the gnarled blue veins on her hands, her work-worn hands.
“It’s the least I could do,” I say.
Two seconds.
“Anything I can do for you here?” I ask. She turns to face me again, smiles.
“No, no!” she says.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Quite sure,” she says.
Two seconds more.
Then I hear Eskil say: “Oh, go on, let him help!”
I notice the way Mum’s face immediately lights up. She stops stirring and glances to the side, smiling.
“What are you babbling on about now, you silly idiot?” she cries gaily.
And Eskil strolls in to join us. He has removed his sunglasses from his brow and nibbles on one leg of them as he flashes that lopsided grin he thinks is so charming. He eyes Mum, removes the sunglasses from his mouth.
“Let the lad help you, I said! You know it’s not easy for him!”
He slips his free hand into his pocket and leans against the door jamb, stands there looking smug. And Mum looks at him and laughs.
“Silly idiot!” she says.
Eskil grins, enjoying this whole situation. He’s just like all other ordinary, average individuals, he loves being called an idiot. I stare at him, feel annoyance growing inside me, there’s something bitter building up in there, a vicious resentment.
“This brother of yours is so silly, I’m at my wit’s end,” Mum says and she turns to me and shakes her head, smiling. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him,” she adds.
“Oh, really?” I say.
She gives me a slightly puzzled look. And this bitterness grows inside me, this resentment. I’m so close to telling them that I’ve got several good suggestions for what to do with him, but I manage to restrain myself, just stand there. There’s silence, and Mum and Eskil look at me and now I have to say something, it doesn’t matter what, just say something.
“Think I’ll nip down to the beach for a swim!” I blurt.
Silence again.
Mum looks at me, frowns.
“Now?” she asks.
I yawn, give a little shrug, try to act casual, but don’t quite manage it.
“I’ve got time before dinner,” I say, look at her and force a little smile, turn slightly, look at Eskil, he grins and his eyes bore into mine. I hold his gaze for a split second, then look at the floor, feel my face grow hot, feel myself flushing with anger and embarrassment.
“Yeah, well, you don’t need me here, do you?” I say, and I hear how bitter I sound, hear the self-pity in what I say. And I feel myself growing even hotter, even more embarrassed.
“Oh, but Jon,” Mum says. “Surely you could put off swimming till later. It’s not often that we’re together, all three of us.”
I look at her.
“All three of us? What about Hilde, doesn’t she count?” I say, so loud that Hilde is bound to hear. I look at Mum and force a smile.
Total silence.
I look at Mum, see her mouth slowly drop open, see her eyes change colour, darken. She glares at me and I bleed inside, shame burns inside me and my anger glows red, but I stare straight at her and go on smiling. A moment, then she simply turns away and goes back to the sauce, stirs.
Silence.
I just stand here, flushed and smiling. And Eskil looks at me. He raises his eyebrows a fraction, shakes his head, doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything either, keep the smile in place as I walk out of the kitchen, bleeding inside, but trying to look as nonchalant as I can, stroll, back burning, through the living room and out of the veranda door.
The longing to get away was one of several things that bound us together. We both had the same urge to leave Namsos and never come back. I can’t have been more than eleven or twelve when I hung a poster on my wall of New York by night, and in the evening before I fell asleep I would often lie in bed and imagine what it would be like to live in that particular street, in that particular skyscraper, behind that particular window. Even at that age I had the feeling that the life I was meant to live could never be possible in the small, sleepy sawmill town where I’d grown up, and I became all the more convinced of this after I met you, developing as we did a kind of common disdain for the small-town life that we knew. We loved to put down and sneer at Namsos and the local folk, we worked ourselves up into a kind of mutual ecstasy as we wandered aimlessly around the streets, vying with each other in our dislike of the town and its inhabitants. We longed to be far away from the streets of a town centre that was dead and deserted after four in the afternoon, far away from the wind and the rain that swept in off the fjord and lashed against the grey Fifties housing blocks, away from the hotdog stand where rowdy teenagers with bottles of home-brewed hooch and
grape soda in their inside pockets hung out on Saturday nights, and where the cloying smell of deep-frying mingled with the acrid reek of scorched rubber from Taunuses burning down on Havnegata. We liked to think of Namsos folk as insular country bumpkins and ourselves as broad-minded and inquisitive, with our sights set on the great, wide world; we never tired of telling each other how small Namsos was, how cut off and sheltered from the rest of the world. “
Ben Hur
should be coming to Namsos cinema any day now,” we’d say when we were discussing films we thought sounded interesting, films that were already showing in the major towns and cities, but which we would have to wait maybe two or three months to see, if they ever reached Namsos at all. “He probably thought I was talking about cigarettes,” I said once, when the assistant in one of the town’s two record shops told us they didn’t have any Prince in stock. We pretended to be dismayed, frustrated and even angered by such incidents, but looking back on it it’s easy to see how we relished them and relied on them to make us feel as smart, socially conscious and sophisticated as we wanted to feel. “Set aside a couple of nights a year for a variety show and they’ll be all for it,” I said when the popular outcry against building an arts centre was at its height. And you, who had just started smoking and were doing your best to look laid-back and worldly-wise with a cigarillo jutting between your fingers, laughed and shook your head at these uncouth peasants who sat cooped up inside their detached bungalows, watching
The Cosby Show
and other inane TV programmes, and who – unlike us – never looked as if they had any idea that art and literature and music were what gave life meaning and the only things worth talking about.
And when talking about art and literature and music, especially if there was anyone else around, we adopted a rather elaborate, long-winded manner of speech. We would often stop in the middle of a sentence, making lengthy pauses for thought, during which we closed our eyes, blew down our noses and acted as if we were giving a lot of thought to something, imagining as we did that this made us look and sound clever and intellectual, as well as giving the impression that whatever we had just said was something we had come up with at that very moment, as indeed it sometimes was. Just as often, though, it was something we’d read and memorized from a newspaper or one of the magazines we sometimes went down to the library to read. As it happens, it was in one of these magazines that we first learned of the Beat Generation and for us this marked the beginning of a new era, since it was the literary heroes of the beats and their free-and-easy attitude to sex that encouraged us to give in to the attraction we had gradually begun to feel for one another.
We had come close to having sex before this, too, though: not nearly as drunk as I made myself out to be and with a nervous laugh intended to underline that this was just a bit of fun, I had asked you to pull down your trousers and let me suck you off, and with a laugh that was every bit as uncertain as my own, you did as I asked. But just as I went down on my knees I glanced up and met your eye, and even though I knew that you really did want me to do it, my courage failed me and the whole thing ended with the two of us bursting into strained, almost hysterical laughter. Both then and in the days that followed we were so eager to show each other that we hadn’t meant anything by what had happened that it’s hard to believe only six months later we’d be having sex just about every chance we got.
The first time it happened we were in my room. We’d been out in the sun all day, we were hot and sweaty and lying on my bed, one at either end, taking it easy and talking about the hole in the ozone layer and how neither of us could recall our parents ever putting suncream on us when we were kids, despite the fact that, as far as we remembered, we had been out in the sun all day long during the summer. At first you acted as if you weren’t aware that I was lying there gazing at your glistening, perspiring body, but after our eyes had met a few times it became hard to act normal and eventually, when the air around us was charged and tremulous with all that had gone unsaid and it was no longer possible for either of us to concentrate on the actual conversation, you came up with a sort of bridge between our words and our thoughts: “I’ve got a mole on my groin that’s looking a bit dark,” you said, thus giving me the sign I’d been waiting for. Not daring to look you in the eye I asked you to pull down your shorts so I could have a look and, struggling to look as though this was all about the mole and nothing but the mole, you did as I said. Even when my fingers began to probe under the thick, black pubic hair, prompting your cock to rise slowly to one side and gently brush my trembling hand, we tried to maintain the pretence. But moments later, when I found the mole and, in a thick, husky voice, told you it was nothing to worry about, we had to make a decision. Either we had to do what we both wanted to do, or we had to do as we had done in previous, similar situations, which is to say: continue the pretence and act as if it had all simply been an innocent examination of a mole. And it was at this point that I suddenly happened to think of the Beat poets. While we had tried to regard the average Namsos resident as being hampered by the old idea of not getting above yourself and by an inherited
sense of shame, we had done our best to see ourselves as being as bold and experimental as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac; and if it hadn’t been for my urge to emulate these role models, I wouldn’t have dared take you into my mouth the way I did at that moment. If it hadn’t been for Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac I’d probably have felt embarrassed afterwards too, but I didn’t, and nor did you. Quite the opposite, really. Having sex with one another was proof of a sort that the image of ourselves which we had formed was real, so afterwards we felt quite proud of ourselves. We lay there side by side, naked, running with sweat and sated, blowing smoke rings, listening to Prudence and trying to look as though what we’d just done was as normal for us as eating a sandwich or watching television.
In the spring of 1988 we met Silje Shiive and for the whole of our second and third years in senior secondary we were the best of friends, you, me and her. Her father was dead, she lived with her slightly eccentric artist mother and a grumpy ginger tom called Laurence, after Laurence Olivier.
Silje had an air of charming arrogance about her. Her veiled, lazy eyes and distracted manner, her habit of being forgetful, inattentive and a little on the careless side made it look as though she wasn’t particularly interested in what was going on around her, and this apparent lack of interest and involvement appealed to a lot of young and not quite so young men, all of them eager to prove that he was fascinating enough to capture and hold her attention. Silje was well aware of this, of course, it was often a deliberate ploy on her part, and sometimes she would go too far and make a show of not paying attention. She would pretend that she hadn’t seen someone or hadn’t heard what they said, or she would yawn
openly when they were speaking to her. But contrary to what one might think, she seemed no less charming on those rare occasions when she was caught out and accused of playing hard to get and trying to make herself seem interesting. Far from it: if her cover was blown she would simply shrug it off with a rueful laugh, turning the whole situation to her advantage and making herself appear even more attractive.
But her arrogance wasn’t always charming. She could be tactless, rude and ruthlessly honest and a lot of people dreaded being in her company because you never knew what she was likely to come out with in the way of awkward questions or hurtful comments. She often asked things that a lot of other people wondered about, but would never have dared to ask, just as she often said things that lots of people agreed with, but either didn’t dare or were too polite to say. And almost always she would express herself in a way that made it difficult to challenge her. She would act innocent, make a joke of it so that her victim seemed churlish if he or she protested, or she would confuse the person concerned by making them think that whatever she said it was out of kindness and with the best of intentions: “You’re really brave, I’d never dare to get my hair cut that short if the back of my head was so flat,” she said once to a girl with whom she had a score to settle, when she walked into the classroom with a new haircut. She was at her most merciless, though, if she thought she detected the slightest whiff of male chauvinism. She was the sort of feminist who could hurt a boy most cruelly on behalf of all the hard-done-by women in history. That there were men who raped and beat up women seemed justification enough for her to pass comment on the size of some poor guy’s penis, and that Latin males had a reputation for being womanizers seemed reason enough for her to fool a nice Italian musician
friend of mine into believing that she fancied him, only then to give him the brush-off in the most humiliating fashion. “There, that’ll give him some idea of what life’s like for women in his country,” she said afterwards.
I don’t remember exactly how we got to know her, but I do remember that we were both very surprised to meet a girl who was genuinely interested in the same things as us. Despite the reckless, almost sinister sides of her character, we hit it off with her right from the start, and there were times when we slept and ate almost more at her house than we did at our own, something which made Oddrun, Silje’s mother, very happy. “If you want to stay young,” she used to say, “you have to spend time with young people.” And when word got around that Oddrun had a voracious sexual appetite and enjoyed the company of young men, she laughed that coarse, husky laugh of hers; it would never have occurred to her to be more discreet or hold herself more aloof. Quite the opposite. Oddrun liked being provocative and shocking people. Once, when you were helping her to change the washer on the tap for the garden hose and she noticed the retired army officer who lived next door watching the two of you through binoculars from his living room window, she suddenly pulled you to her and kissed you full on the lips. Back inside the house she could hardly stop laughing. “That phone of his will be red hot till tomorrow morning, I bet you,” she said.
Oddrun didn’t seem to give a toss what people thought of her. She would sit on her balcony, knocking back the drink on a Tuesday morning while people walked by down below. She would march straight into the newsagent’s and buy
Playgirl
no matter how big a queue there was, and instead of hiding it in her bedroom she’d leave it lying on one of the bookshelves in the living room. But according to my mum
she hadn’t always been like that. Silje’s father had been a Freemason and businessman with a reputation to maintain. He had expected Oddrun to be respectable and presentable at the very least, and it wasn’t until the early Eighties, after he had contracted some sort of lung disease and died, that Oddrun “became hellbent on being a Bohemian and doing all the things her husband wouldn’t let her do,” as Mum put it.
Silje pretended to despair of Oddrun’s unconventional habits, the little scandals she caused and the way she occasionally set tongues wagging, but from the way she acted it was clear that she was actually proud of this side of her mother and admired it. “Oh, Mum, for heaven’s sake,” she would say, rolling her eyes. “Oh, God, I’m so mortified,” she would sigh, putting her hands to her face. But unlike you and me, who were still embarrassed by and blushed for our mothers, she never blushed, not at all, she simply laughed at it all and the very next day she would be entertaining friends and acquaintances with the latest antics of her crazy Bohemian mother. Oddrun, for her part, knew that Silje was only pretending to be shocked and dismayed and she responded to this playacting with a little playacting of her own: “What?” she would say, frowning and looking as though she had no idea what was so shocking about what she had just said or done.
And we admired her and looked up to her as much as Silje did. She was well-read, well-informed and intelligent and we found it hard to understand how a woman like her could take the time to talk to us as often and at such length as she did, why she would ask us in for a cup of tea even if Silje wasn’t home, why she invited us to her parties and treated us exactly the same as all of her other, adult, guests.
She didn’t hold the sort of parties that Mum and the other adults I knew held, though. She held salons. And at her salons
she served apéritifs in long-stemmed, wide-bowled glasses with glacé cherries on plastic cocktail sticks propped against the rims, and her guests – often well-known faces from local arts circles and occasionally from the world of commerce – mingled and chatted until it was time go in to dinner, which never consisted of lamb stew or a casserole with lager on the side – the usual fare when grown-ups had a party – but of some French-sounding dish served with mushrooms that Oddrun had picked herself, and always accompanied by a fine wine, more often than not from the same region as the dish itself, which, according to Silje’s mother, would go very well with the food.