Encircling (25 page)

Well, you certainly learned you were mortal that time. Of the three of us I was the only one who knew a little bit about fungi – Mum was a keen mushroom picker and I had gone mushroom gathering with her lots of times – and when I asked you to describe to me the one you had eaten (I hadn’t managed to get a good look at it before you popped it in your mouth) and it sounded to me as if it might be a Deadly webcap, a very common species in pine forests, you, Jon and I were thrown into a state of shock that would last for about two weeks. My face was white and grave as I told you that just a tiny crumb of Deadly webcap was enough to cause permanent kidney damage and that a whole one, such as you had just eaten, could be enough to kill as many as ten people. At first you played it cool, merely pooh-poohing Jon when, tearfully and more distraught than I had ever seen him, he begged you to see a doctor right away (he even started pulling and tugging at you to make you come with him). But
it wasn’t long before you turned quiet, pale and thoughtful and by the time we got home and found, on reading Mum’s book on mushrooms, that it was too late to do anything once the poison had been absorbed into the bloodstream and that it could take it up to fourteen days for symptoms to appear, to be followed by a swift and agonizing death, there was no doubt that this was a state you were now anxious to escape from. During your worst fits of panic I could actually see the beads of sweat breaking out on your chalk-white face and it was the sight of you lying on Mum’s sofa that prompted me to write a song containing the line, “The cigarette lies in the ashtray, curled up in the foetal position”; lyrics to which, by the way, Jon added a lovely tune.

Fourteen days later, however, when you still hadn’t taken ill, you couldn’t tell us often enough how happy you were that you’d eaten that mushroom. You felt stronger and fitter than ever before, you said, and one evening when we were eating pizza and watching
The Deer Hunter
on video you insisted on playing the Russian roulette scene over and over again and kept pointing to Christopher Walken and saying, “There you are, guys, that’s me.”

We talked about all of this in the days after you left that ladies’ scarf in Åge Viken’s car, but although you managed to pacify me, you did not manage to convince me that what you had done was right, and when I said that losing her husband was actually enough in itself to jolt any woman out of her humdrum existence and that “this work of art of yours” (said with a little snort) was, therefore, not only unethical, but also unnecessary, you had no valid argument to offer. “But you have to admit, it was beautiful,” was all you said, and then you gave that charming laugh that always softened my heart.

The time when we were entranced by a crane:

My hair had dried after our swim, but the salt had left it stiff and bristling and when we hopped off our bikes and were wheeling them up the steep slope I suggested that we pop by Jon’s house to rinse ourselves off with the garden hose before setting out on our photo shoot. That was fine by Jon, but we would have to keep the noise down, he said, because his mother hadn’t slept a wink the night before, she’d been in so much pain, and now she was lying sleeping immediately above the tap for the hose. We looked at one another, you and I, and rolled our eyes slightly when he said this, I remember, because it was so typical of Jon to focus on and then blow out of all proportion the problems that might arise if one did this or that. The tap for the hose and Grete’s bedroom window were situated, if not on different sides of the house, then certainly far enough away from one another that we would have had to really shout and scream in order to wake her, and I was about to breathe a sulky “Yeah, yeah, Jon”, but it died on my lips because we were now so far up the slope that we could see across the flat stretch ahead of us and suddenly I caught sight of Arvid, watching a gang of construction workers tearing down an old house. So I drew your attention to him instead.

“Imagine working in this heat,” was the first thing Arvid said to us when we reached him, and he pointed to the four workmen on the site in front of us, their coppery bodies glistening with sweat. Three of them were standing smoking and chatting while the fourth was sitting in the cab of a crane with a gigantic, rust-brown steel ball suspended from it by two steel chains – the sort of thing that I had only ever seen
in my old Donald Duck comics. “Yeah,” we said and we said no more, so entranced were we by this comic-book machine. We simply stood and stared as the man in the cab began to pull the slender, black-knobbed levers, causing the steel ball to swing back and forth a few times, gradually rising higher and higher in the air and swinging faster and faster until eventually it smashed into the wall of the house, sending chunks of bricks and mortar flying like the bricks of a Lego house and come crashing down, sending up clouds of sand and greyish-white dust. I rested my elbow on my searing-hot bike seat and pointed to the twisted brown rods of reinforcing steel protruding from what was left of the wall: the shreds and fragments of mortar that clung to their tips made them look like bum hair with bits of shit stuck to it, otherwise known as dingleberries. You chuckled when I said this to you, but only minutes later this same comment was to prompt another display of ghastly sentimentality from Jon.

It started with me remarking, after we’d been cycling for a while, that Arvid had been looking a bit glum. You said he was probably feeling a bit glum. He had spent most of his childhood living with the eldest of his aunts, who had given him enough in the way of food, drink and clothing, but far too little in terms of warmth, closeness and love, and with whom he had, therefore, a somewhat strained relationship. But from birth until the age of nine, when the dog tipped over a forgotten candle in their holiday cottage and started a fire in which his father and mother died, he had lived in the red-brick house we had just watched being demolished. “He doesn’t talk much about the time when he lived there with his parents, but he gets quite emotional whenever he leafs through the photo album from those years,” I remember you saying, and Jon got upset at this and shocked at me for
comparing the remains of Arvid’s childhood home to pieces of shit, as he said.

At first we thought he was joking, but once we realized that he actually wanted to be taken seriously and that this was merely another attempt to appear sensitive and caring we told him to cut out the bullshit, and shortly afterwards, after we had propped our bikes up against the garage wall at Jon’s place and gone to rinse off the salt, I made a point of screaming so loudly that I woke Grete. I laughed and blamed it on the ice-cold water, but it was clear from my grin that I was lying and that made Jon mad, and then of course he refused to come on the photo shoot after all, which would have been absolutely fine, not to say a pleasant relief if we hadn’t needed Jon to hold the light. He was well aware of this fact, of course, and milked it for all it was worth. He went all sad and dejected-looking, making it quite clear to us that it would be difficult to persuade him to come along, although not impossible of course, because in that case he knew we’d be on our bikes like a shot, leaving him behind, and this in turn would rob him of the pleasure of having us beg and plead and say that we really wanted him to come with us. I don’t know how long we sat in their garden coaxing and cajoling him, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour. We – or rather you, since I detested his play-acting and had to stand back a bit so as not to ruin everything by coming straight out and saying exactly what I thought – tried to soften him up by turning on the charm, being artificially bright and cheerful. It wasn’t until he started going on about how hard it was for his mother, though, and about how much pain she was in that you not only took the time to listen to him, but actually managed to look as if you were interested in what he was saying, and then he began to thaw. “Oh, all right, I’ll come,”
he said at last (as if he were doing us a big favour), but by then he had, as so often before, succeeded in killing most of the enthusiasm and creative spark in both you and me, and no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t summon up the energy necessary to take a good picture. Jon, on the other hand, was suddenly in sparkling form and when we got to the point at Merraneset, where we meant to take interior shots of the old German bunkers, he was the real live wire of the group, burning with enthusiasm and bursting with ideas. He was like a parasite, he sucked the energy out of us. The more invigorated he became, the more we withered away and, although our thoughts on this may not have been entirely clear at the time, nonetheless we sensed how all of this hung together and it filled us with a rage that we found harder and harder to contain.

The time when Mum received some good news:

Mum was lying sleeping with her mouth open and you, I and some of her friends were sitting in a semicircle round the hospital bed, rather like teeth around a tongue. She must have eaten just before we arrived because the staff hadn’t taken away her plate and although the window was open the faint smell of boiled sausages still hung in the air. In my mind’s eye I suddenly saw link upon link of red frankfurters marching into her gaping mouth, like in a cartoon. And just as in cartoons such things tend to segue into something else, so the frankfurter links turned into a string of red railway carriages steaming into a dark tunnel, an image which prompted me, quite out of the blue, to utter loudly and clearly the words “sausage train”. In the split second before the others could respond to this I pictured a train
whose passengers were all dead bulls, horses, cows and sheep, all crammed into dark, airless compartments, but then, when I became aware that the heads of everyone else in the room, including you, had swivelled (owl-like) towards me, and when the funny looks I was being given alerted me to what I had actually said, this image went straight out of my head (although I did use it later in an advert for vegetarian food) and I burst out laughing.

If anyone else had been there with me they might well have thought that I wasn’t quite myself, what with the state Mum was in, and that was why I was behaving as I was, but none of those present was of a sentimental bent. They may have looked a little confused when I said it, but then, like a somewhat sluggish engine, the laughter sputtered into life and suddenly everyone around the sickbed was splitting their sides, and this, of course (and not surprisingly), woke Mum.

As soon as she opened her eyes I could tell that she had good news for us. The person looking out through her eyes now was happy and much less frightened than she had been in the days before her admission to hospital, and after making a crack about what rotten friends we were, laughing and enjoying ourselves around her sickbed, she told us that the doctors had found nothing wrong with her and that in all likelihood a lack of sleep combined with overwork, too little food and far too much alcohol was to blame for the problems with her sight, the nausea and the incident when she had fainted and fallen off her chair.

The worry she had felt until the doctors had given her the good news I would later come to picture as a kind of virus that passes from one host body to another, because it was probably hearing her talk about diseases that could lie dormant in the body for decades all undetected, only then to suddenly wake
up and destroy a life in next to no time, that gave you the idea that your biological father might have suffered from just such a serious hereditary disease, and the next thing I knew it was you, and not Mum, who couldn’t stop worrying that you were sick.

Such a disease would explain why your mother refused to tell you who your father was, I remember you saying. Because people who knew from an early age that they were suffering from a serious illness often succumbed to other ills. While some might be plagued by depression, anxiety or other forms of mental illness, others got it into their heads that they had to live life to the full while they could and ended up as alcoholics, drug addicts or decadent pleasure-seekers of one sort or another. And that being the case it was not surprising that your mother felt you were better off not knowing, or so you thought.

“So now you’re looking for a soldier rapist with a tic who also happens to be suffering from a serious hereditary disease,” I said, and as before you laughed out loud when I joked about your fantasies concerning your father’s identity.

The time when the Weed pointed at us and laughed:

When Mum and my husband and I were in Namsos a few weeks ago we went for an evening stroll by the river. After several weeks of hot, dry weather the water level was much lower than normal and among all the other rubbish that had accumulated on the river bed over the years, I spotted a rusty old fold-up bike with red and yellow detonating cord wound round the spokes. A greyish-green blanket of sludge had draped itself over the seat and initially I thought that this was what gave the bike the look of a drowned horse,
the steed of a medieval knight, lying there with its cape (or cover or whatever it’s called) rising and falling with the current. Only half a minute later, though, when we were halfway across the old wooden bridge and I turned and saw the bike and the rest of the scene from another angle, I realized that this notion stemmed from something else entirely, namely from an incident when this guy whom we used to call the Weed pointed at us and laughed.

The Weed was only two or three years younger than us, but if not retarded, he was certainly a bit simple, and happiest therefore in the company of kids a few years younger than himself. One day when you and I were walking over the old bridge that Mum, my husband and I crossed a few weeks ago, we saw him and these younger chums of his in the little car park on the other side. They were playing at being knights at a tournament, riding around on their bikes, each with a stick for a lance, yelling and zooming round and round, knocking imaginary opponents off their mounts and hurling them to the ground, to the ecstatic cheers of the king they served, fair maidens in towers or whatever other witnesses to their deeds they saw and heard in their minds. But when the Weed spotted us he slammed on the brakes, slewing round and gouging a dark-brown streak in the gravel; and there he sat (wobbling on his seat for the first half-second), with his lance in the air, pointing at us and hooting with laughter, his mouth wide open. His eyes were round and avid, they flicked back and forth between us and his chums in a way that made him look like a stoat or a weasel or something of the sort. “Lovebirds, look at the lovebirds!” he yelled and I can still hear the wild, whinnying laugh he let out.