Encircling (10 page)

Within a month of Berit’s death you had had enough of living in the same house as Arvid, so you moved in with Silje and Oddrun. You could stay with them till university started in the September.

A rift had developed between you and Arvid almost as soon as Berit was gone. He had started making all the arrangements for the funeral the very day after she died, but to everyone’s great surprise you suddenly insisted that the funeral had to be a civil affair. At first this made Arvid feel sorry for you because he thought you were suffering from some form of shock. But he soon became so angry and frustrated over this that with me as a terrified onlooker he lost his legendary self-possession. You had no shame, he roared, you’d been jealous of him from the day he and Berit met and this just showed how far you were willing to go to punish him for taking your mother away from you. We were in the kitchen at your house, and I remember the little spray of spittle from his lips as he bent forward till your faces were almost touching and yelled at you that you were a total egomaniac who had always begrudged Berit and him their happiness. You tried to stay as cool and calm as always, but you were trembling with rage as you told Arvid
that he had never known Berit, that she had tried hard to be the woman he wanted her to be, but she never could. And, you went on, not long before she died she had broken down in front of you and said that she felt like a stranger in her own life. She wasn’t a religious woman, she couldn’t stand the Christian community that she’d become a part of, and she had told you quite frankly that she was thinking of leaving Arvid and finding a place of her own. With glistening eyes and quivering voice you said that you hated yourself for not giving her your support back then, you had simply told her that it was up to her, and you’d made it clear to her that you didn’t want to hear any more about it. Giving her a funeral befitting the woman she had really been was the least you could do.

Arvid didn’t believe one word of what you said, he was convinced that you were only out to punish him and since he stuck as stubbornly to his guns as you did to yours there was nothing for it but to arrange two separate ceremonies: a religious service in the hospital chapel one day, and a civil ceremony in the community centre the day after.

Although it was only a couple of months until you moved to Trondheim to study, there was no way you could stay with him after that and it was a relief for both you and Arvid when Silje and Oddrun offered to let you move in with them.

I began to feel more and more uncomfortable at Silje’s and Oddrun’s place, although at the time I didn’t know why. I was often irritable, bad-tempered even, when we were together, but since it was the very arrogance that I had once admired and envied in them that now pissed me off, I was confused by my own feelings. I told you I thought they’d changed, that they’d gone from being self-confident
to self-righteous, condescending and contemptuous. Now, though, I can see that it was me who had changed.

The fact was that during the last six months at senior secondary something had happened that had made me aware of things I’d noticed but never given much thought to before. It suddenly dawned on me that it was as exotic an experience for Silje to visit my home as it was for me to visit hers, and certain things Oddrun had said to me made me realize that Silje told her stories about how Mum and Eskil and I lived, that they talked about how the television was always on, whether anyone was watching it or not, that they talked about the ketchup bottle that was put out on the table no matter what we were having for dinner, about the way Mum and Eskil and I talked to one another, and about the over-furnished living room with all its ornaments and family photos and the tasteless curtains tied back with gold ribbons. Once, when I had voiced some precocious and no doubt well-rehearsed opinion on why Kieslowski was such a great director, I remember Oddrun smiling appreciatively and saying how wonderful it was that I’d turned out the way I had, considering that I’d been brought up in a house without books – which was not too far from the truth, since the bookshelf at home held only three volumes of
The Norwegian Yearbook
and a slightly larger collection of
Nordic Crime Chronicles
but Oddrun couldn’t possibly have known this unless Silje had told her and in any case I didn’t think she had any right to point this out it to me. I felt hurt on Mum’s behalf, it was a mean thing to say, especially when she was as sick and depressed as she was.

And this may have been why I started to dislike that air of arrogance that I’d once tried to imitate and adopt. The way Oddrun shook her head sadly at the fact that so few Namsos
folk ever bothered to pick all the wonderful mushrooms that they had growing right on their doorsteps, but left them to rot instead; how Silje bought
The Crying Boy
and hung it on the living room wall to give her mother a good laugh when she came home; that she spoke of the technical college as if it were a mental institution and the girls at the supermarket checkout as if they were retarded. I began to see such things as digs at my mother.

But I was also deeply resentful of my mother at that time. She never came straight out and asked me whether I could stay home and give her a hand, but the more time I spent with her and on housework, the more dependent on me she became, until it got to the point where I could tell that she simply expected me to be there at her beck and call, and this in turn filled me with an anger I was never able to express properly and didn’t quite know how to deal with. I would find myself hating her when she lay on the couch watching television while I stacked firewood or washed cups, and there were times when I told myself that her friends were right when they said she made a meal of her affliction, that she wallowed in her ill health and embraced the role of victim as it allowed her to order about me and anyone else close to her. But before long this bitterness and anger always gave way to guilt, and this – along with the knowledge that I never protested when Silje and Oddrun made fun of her background and everything she represented – meant that I had an almost constant sense of letting her down.

The fact that I too had been so keen to poke fun at and distance myself from small-town people and small-town life made it even more difficult for me to disagree with them. I may have suspected that there was a difference between the contempt you and I showed for Namsos and its residents
and the contempt shown by Silje and her mother, but only later did it strike me that our contemptuousness was a form of self-defence. While Silje and Oddrun made fun of Namsos because they actually did feel superior to the locals in just about every area in which they felt it was worth being superior, our contempt was a response to the contempt we felt we encountered in this small town. We were just two insecure teenagers, eager to reassure ourselves that we were worth something even though we were different, and this we did by bad-mouthing those whom we thought were bad-mouthing us.

As Silje and I grew further and further apart I became more aware of how I had sucked up to her and Oddrun and how you were still sucking up to them. I remember one occasion when we were at Silje’s house while a couple of workmen were there. They had been hired to sand down, wash and repaint the house, but Silje’s mother never gave them a moment’s peace, she found fault with everything they did and was so condescending and so critical that even Silje looked embarrassed. Not you, though. I saw the way you glanced at her mother and raised your eyebrows when the workmen’s backs were turned, as if you and she were natural allies in the company of such morons.

Even worse was the time when we bumped into an old classmate of mine on the street and took him along with us to Silje’s place to play Trivial Pursuit. Silje didn’t say a word when he couldn’t answer the question as to which World War II commander had been known as the Desert Fox, nor when he didn’t know which famous writer was associated with the Globe Theatre, but the longer this went on, the more questions he passed on, the heavier Silje sighed. The only question he was able to answer had to do with an actor who had appeared
in
Police Academy II
– which threw us slightly since this wasn’t the sort of question anyone we mixed with should have been able to answer, and when Silje burst out laughing he must have thought she was remembering some scene from the film, so he burst out laughing too. It was only when he saw the sympathetic look on my face that he realized Silje wasn’t laughing at the same thing as him at all, and although he stayed a little while longer for appearance’s sake that was the moment when he realized he wasn’t welcome there. “Do me a favour, don’t ever bring that dummy here again,” Silje said after he had gone and to my great disappointment, I remember, you started to apologize. You, whom I had once regarded as the bravest person in the world, the one person who always spoke up if someone was being unfairly treated, not only did you not defend him, you actually apologized for bringing him to the house in the first place. We hadn’t wanted to, you said, we’d tried to hint that he wasn’t welcome, but he had insisted on tagging along anyway – all of which was true enough, but it didn’t help matters.

When I looked at you, I saw myself as I had been not that long ago and this may have made me dislike this behaviour even more than I would have done, I don’t know. At any rate, I remember how angry I was, I remember that feeling of somehow slipping into a bitter, resentful mood and not being able to get myself out of it again. I really wanted to, I didn’t want to lose what we had, so I tried to pull myself together, to be the person I’d always been, but it was no use, and I found myself saying less and less when we were at your and Silje’s place. I lost all enthusiasm, I no longer got any pleasure from things I’d once enjoyed, I was listless and sluggish, and while you and Silje were every bit as enthusiastic as before and tried to involve me in one project after another, I refused
to play along and made a big show of being uninterested. I could be sitting in a chair, yawning and acting up, and if you asked what I thought or felt about a piece of writing or an art project you had produced or were planning to produce, I would merely say “Hmm” and pretend that I hadn’t been paying attention.

All of this only served to drive us further and further apart, of course. You never said anything about wanting to end our friendship, but the signals you sent out were clear enough. You started avoiding situations in which we would be alone together and suddenly you no longer liked or you’d do down things that we had both enjoyed and that had in some way bound us to each other. Writers and bands whose genius we had extolled and whom we had spent untold hours discussing and immersing ourselves in were now, in your eyes, no longer so great, and all of a sudden you started talking about possibly going to Oslo University instead of Trondheim, where I was planning to go. It wasn’t too late to change your mind, you said, and when you presented the pros and cons of these two alternatives you were careful not to cite me as one of the advantages of going to Trondheim; even when I was quite blatantly angling for you to say that you’d rather be in the same town as me you didn’t mention it. You made such a point of it sometimes that I was left in no doubt: you were simply trying to tell me that I was not a part of your plans for the future.

I got over this long, long ago, of course. But sitting here in our old cottage, writing and looking back on it, I feel something of the same nausea I felt when it began to dawn on me that you didn’t want any more to do with me, the chill dread that washes over you when you realize that you’re not actually wanted. I remember how much it hurt to walk away from you
on the day when I finally knew beyond any doubt that that was what you wanted. Every bit of me screamed to go back to you, but common sense forced my feet to keep walking.

For a long time I tried to tell myself you had backed out because you couldn’t cope with the serious turn our relationship had taken. I told myself that it had scared you to discover how much you actually meant to me, I told myself that my slightly hesitant caresses and the joy I had shown when you said you loved me had made it impossible to go on pretending that what was going on between us was merely an innocent exploration of our sexuality and that you couldn’t cope with the alternative; you couldn’t bring yourself to admit that you were gay. That university was just around the corner, that we had talked about sharing a flat in Trondheim when we moved there, that we were going to enter adulthood, so to speak, as a gay couple, thus confirming the rumours about us, only made it all seem that much more serious and terrifying, of course, and in the end it had been too much for you.

I remember calling you once when I was drunk and cursing you for being a coward. I accused you of only having moved in with Silje in order to put paid to the rumour that we were gay. You’d never been the person you made yourself out to be, I said, you’d always done your best to appear self-assured, independent and liberated, I said, but behind that strong, silent façade there hid an anxious little boy who was terrified of what people might think or say – all of which was probably true, but it was no more true of you than it was of me and just about everybody else of our age.

Today I’m not so sure that you backed out because you were scared. I don’t know, but I think you did it quite simply because you weren’t gay. I don’t really know whether I was gay or straight myself back then, I haven’t been with another
man since we went our separate ways, and during the days I’ve spent writing this letter it has struck me more than once that various problems I’m wrestling with now may have led me to present us as being closer to each other than we actually were. Although, I’m not sure about that either: writing this, it occurs to me that it’s those same present problems that cause me to put such a negative slant on things, to give the idea that we might not have got on so well together after all. Because we did get on really well together. All the events and the conversations I’ve referred to in this letter seem to me like memories of a happy time, a time I miss, despite all the problems I’ve mentioned.