In The Wake (11 page)

I have had my fill now, I ate half the loaf and drank milk out of the blue cup, and I did that sitting in the car in the courtyard of my former trade union’s holiday camp where I drove in just after I left the shop. I had not planned to go there, I had not planned anything, but that is where I went. From the car I could see the Lysern stretching
in a narrow neck of water behind the main building, and I saw the suspension bridge crossing to the chalets on the other side. I don’t know how many times I have crossed that bridge. There was ice on the water now, but the last time I was there people stood along the shore with their fishing rods and pails with perch in them, and there were rowing boats on the water and it was summer and laughter
all over the
place
. I was going to be divorced, and I knew it. I had been waiting there a week for the woman I had seen behind me in the mirror almost every morning for fifteen years, and now I was trying to forget what she looked like. It was so hot I felt paralysed, the sun was baking, and all I wanted to do was to sit on a chair with a strong drink, but I could not do that, I had my daughters
with me and had to fill the days with all kinds of things that belonged to summer so the girls would think it was a perfectly ordinary holiday. My brother had been there with his son and we had talked and talked until there was nothing more to say, until what we said grew into something that made us embarrassed, and then he had left and I was alone not knowing what to do with my days other than
fill them. But on the last evening before she arrived, when the girls were in bed and I knew they were asleep, I put on the new boots I had bought because I was certain it would rain the whole week. I walked across the grass where dew had fallen and over the bridge with a wire fence along the sides which had been almost flattened by youngsters who loved to dive and jump from the edge and several
metres down into the water, and on up the path I went, to the nearest chalet on the other side. The man who was staying there with his family had invited me for a drink several times, but I had refused, I could not drink, and the only thing we had in common was that we had once been members of the same union.

I knocked, someone shouted, and the boy who opened the door was in his pyjamas. He looked
scared. I thought it was the sight of my face, I had not shaved or looked in a mirror for over a week and had no idea what I looked like, but over the boy’s shoulder I saw his father sitting in the only easy chair the place boasted, with a glass in his hand. He called out:

“Talk of the devil, come in, come in,” and it was all so stupid, I didn’t even like him, and he shouted again: “Another glass,
pronto.”

His wife came from the kitchen and put a glass in my hand, and I went up to the chair, and he filled it to the brim with vodka. I can’t take gin or vodka, but it was too late to refuse, I didn’t know
what
to say, so I half emptied the glass in one big gulp, and it burned my throat and spread through my stomach like glowing lava, and I could not help coughing.

“Christ, you’re not that
young, you should be able to take a dram,” he said, and I replied:

“Forty,” when the coughing fit subsided.

“Hell, you’re older than me, then. Look here,” he said and filled my glass again, “try once more, and let’s have a toast,” and I took another swallow, and this time my stomach was prepared. But it tasted nauseous, like drinking aftershave.

“Well, sit yourself down, then,” he said, but
I stayed on my feet, and then he said: “Well, yes, we’ve seen you going to and fro, you and your chum, and we talked
about
it and thought for a while maybe you were gays, but then the wife said gays don’t have kids, so there you are. I’m only joking, you know, so don’t get mad.”

“Well, we’re not gay,” I said, looking at his wife who was standing in the kitchen doorway, she did not want to sit
down either, although there was plenty of room on the sofa and several stools. “It was my brother.”

“Well, there you go. And then I had a word with one of your girls, and she said your wife is coming tomorrow, and we got the idea of the whole gang of you coming along Friday evening, and then we could have a real party, two regular families on holiday, right?”

“Ye-es, well, I don’t know,” I said,
still standing in the middle of the floor, and he sat in the easy chair, and I knew I would never sit down in that chalet.

“I think I’d better get going again,” I said, “the kids are alone.”

“Shit, you can’t just go off at once like that, for Christ’s sake,” he said, and I saw his eyes turn black and frightened like two mirrors, and he grabbed my arm and said: “Hey, don’t go.”

“But I really
must,” I said, emptying the glass. That was a mistake, for now I had downed two glasses of vodka without any water in a quarter of an hour, and there was only a scrap of chocolate and potato crisps in my stomach from an improvised feast with the girls on the last evening when everything was as it used to be,
and
I felt sick. I pulled my arm away and quickly made for the door.

“Just march in and
drink people’s booze and then bunk off again,” I heard behind me, and the door slammed. I tried not to stagger, but it was not easy, it was dark now and the path was rough down to the bridge. I couldn’t take vodka, and I swallowed hard to avoid throwing up. What if the girls had woken up, I couldn’t go to the bathroom without hearing them call me. I walked faster and got to the bridge. Now I
had
to throw up, and I leaned on the rail, but there wasn’t any rail. Jesus, I thought as I fell, this is too ridiculous. I must have made a great splash, but I did not hear a splash. I just fell and felt how cool the water was when I hit the surface, and the stillness when it closed over me, and how my boots filled up and pulled me right down as soon as I went under, and I clearly saw the newspaper
headlines as I squeezed my mouth shut and tried to pull off my boots:
NEWLY DIVORCED MAN DROWNS IN LAKE AT
E
NEBAKK, FOUR METRES FROM DRY LAND.

But someone saw me fall, and they yelled and screamed and woke the whole area and I did not drown. When I rose to the surface at last and could breathe again, I saw lights everywhere, and out of the chalets people came crowding on to the bridge, and some
had torches, and two men, eager for action, played the hero, and stripped off and jumped into the water. I wanted to manage by myself and put up a
fight
, but they didn’t back off and they pulled me ashore by my jacket collar, and there was an awful fuss, and the girls had woken up and were running in their nightdresses among the chalets searching for me, and they all thought I was pissed although
I was not. Some old hags even started to mumble about child neglect, and that was how I lost my right of access to the girls when I was divorced in double-quick time a few weeks later. At first it made me furious, and then I was relieved, because I realised that if I added one thing to the other until it was all way out of control, and at the same time made myself numb and just looked straight
ahead, that was a way of living that I could manage.

The traffic gets thicker. I am approaching Oslo. I drive past a sign which reads: Svartskog 3 km. Just after that I stop, signal and make a U-turn, drive back and on to the Svartskog road, up the steep hill with sharp corners I always thought looked eerie when I was small and sat right at the back of the bus looking out of the window and could
not see the road at all, but only straight down into the abyss. Then I go over the top where the road levels out, and drive past Svartskog church and the big oak tree which isn’t as big as I remember, but still pretty sizeable, with strong bare branches I could build houses in if I were thirty years younger or more, and then past the post office, which is still here in the middle of no man’s land,
and I roll down the hills
alongside
the forest to Bunnefjorden. At Bekkensten Quay the old kiosk has vanished without trace. No-one is fishing from the rocks now as the ice is thick along the shoreline and hundreds of metres out, and I park in the space where the kiosk used to be and walk up the hill on the gravel road with cottages on the right side of the incline to the fjord, which gets steeper
and steeper as it gets to the top. The last cottage stands back from the road with a yellow-painted fence alongside the road and a yellow-painted gate hinged firmly to two posts carefully built with large stones, and in the narrow garden is a flagpole with a slack line. The cottage looks as it always looked; red-painted timbers with a slate roof, but it is so hopelessly much smaller than I remember,
and it is hard to realise it can hold everything I have filled it with since I was last here in 1971. I was nineteen then. The cottage was being sold, and I had gone with my father to fetch some of his things, tools mainly and one or two chairs, and I knew he did not want to sell and had been outvoted by his brothers and sisters. They needed the money, they said. So did my father, of course,
but hell, he had almost built that cottage single-handed, and even though he had good reason not to be there much any more, it was painful for him to see it go. I could understand that.

In those years my brother was at school in England, and that was why
I
went with my father to
Bunnefjorden
and not
him
, and it was so unusual for one of the family to be at school in another country, in England
even, that hardly anyone talked about it. I felt abandoned. I did have two other brothers, but they were younger, and I had been Little Brother for so long that it was all I was fit for, so they lived their life independently of me, and that was something my mother held against me for as long as she lived. I do not know what she thought I could have contributed.

“It’s really a shame to have to
sell this cottage,” I said as we carried the last things out to the van we had borrowed from a neighbour in Veitvet who was a driver for a toy factory, and had his basement filled up with things he had filched from work. But he had no children.

“Do you think so?” my father said.

I said it because I knew
he
felt it was a shame and much more. To me that cottage was full of memories of uncles and
aunts and bladderwrack and glass jellyfish and physical defeats I could well live without. I had no room for it. My life was filled to bursting point, and it had been like that the year before and the year before that, and as long as I had been thinking with the better part of my brain; each year bombarded me with choices I did not understand at all and which left no room for anything more; my
throat was dry from running to catch up, always too late, and the last thing on my mind was fishing for mackerel and cod in the Bunnefjord. I
had
sweated digging trenches and laying cables for the telephone company the whole summer to make enough money to get away to visit my brother in England, and I had enough for the ticket but not for accommodation yet. I had planned to stay for four weeks,
at least.

“Of course it is, isn’t it?” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

That was the end of that conversation. The previous day I had bawled him out and told him he belonged to the most backward part of the working class because he subscribed to
Aftenposten
, so it was not that odd that so little was said.

When we pulled the doors shut and drove down the hill towards Bekkensten Bridge I did not look
back, maybe because it was I who was driving.

But my father did.

Most of the trees have vanished from the steep slope between the cottage and the water. They were felled quite recently, and still some trunks are lying in the very spot where they fell. There’s a smell of fresh timber, and where the light and the view of the fjord used to be filtered through the trunks, it is open now, and bleak
and miserable and drained of magic. Where before there was a little wood that held everything in place, now there is not a stone’s throw to the water. Just a small quiver and it would all slide into the waves. I walk back down the hill to the car.

*

It is almost silly. I drive out to buy some food from a place about ten kilometres north-east of Oslo, and a few hours later I drive into town from
the south, over Hauketo and up the hills near Ljan towards Nordstrand, where the East End merges into a posher West district, and though I do not have a plan it looks like a plan, for I turn into a side road among big detached houses and down past Ljan station and along yet another side road, and stop a hundred metres from the school sitting there brick-grey and massive. I glance at my watch.
In ten minutes the bell will go at the end of the last lesson. I open the window and roll a cigarette, and sit and smoke while I wait. I can do it now, luckily, for this is not a good place to stand at the roadside throwing up.

I switch on the ignition and listen to the radio while I smoke and look over at the school, and when my cigarette burns down to a fag end I switch off. And then the bell
goes. For just a second the sound hangs in the air, then the doors burst open and children stream out into the playground. At the gate the crowd splits up along the various roads, some go up, some down, while others stand about chatting for a bit, and a little group crosses the road towards my car. I spot the red cap at once and hear her voice through the open window. Suddenly I lose courage and
sink down in the seat and stare at the dashboard. I don’t even know if I am
allowed
to be here. But it is too late. She has seen the car and opens the door to the passenger seat, and gets in and sits looking through the windscreen. She is twelve years old.

“Hi, Dad,” she says.

“Hi,” I say. I pull myself up in my seat, still looking ahead. We both stare out of the window at the school.

“How
are you?” she says.

“Not so bad,” I say. “And you?”

“Doing fine, apart from maths.”

“And your sister. Is she getting on OK?”

“She thinks everything’s boring.”

“That’s nothing new.”

She laughs. “No,” she says, “but I don’t know if she really means boring, even if that is what she says.”