Encircling (9 page)

“Hmm.”

“And they’ve started putting the lectures online now, so it’s easier than it was.”

“Right,” I say and I hear the hollow plop as the cork is pulled out of the wine bottle. A moment later she comes back into the living room.

“Here we are,” she says, placing the bottle on the table and crossing to the glass-fronted cabinet in the corner, there’s a nice tinkling sound as she pulls the doors open, a bit of chinking and clinking. She takes out two wineglasses I’ve never seen before, slender, orangey-red ladies’ glasses, the sort that cost three hundred kroner each, made by some middle-aged woman wearing only one earring.

“So what happened at home this time?” she asks as she turns and comes back to the table. She doesn’t look at me, takes the chair on the other side, picks up the bottle and fills our glasses.

“Oh, it wasn’t any one thing,” I say. “You know what it’s like, we just don’t get on all that well,” I add, don’t feel like talking about it, play the whole thing down, act as though there really isn’t anything to talk about, it’s just the usual story.

“Have you ever wondered why you don’t get on?” she asks, putting down the bottle and looking straight at me with those green eyes, gooseberry eyes.

I don’t answer immediately, force a feeble little smile, a plea to her to leave it alone.

“Huh?” she asks.

“Wenche, please!” I sigh.

“Well, have you?”

“Can’t we talk about something else?”

“But it’s important,” she says, looks at me and smiles. “It’s your mother and your brother we’re talking about.”

I look at her, the fire in those green eyes of hers, this intensity that I’ve never understood, don’t know where she gets it from, this intensity. She smiles and tries to appear relaxed but she’s so bloody persistent.

“I know, but I can’t be bothered talking about it right now,” I say and I pick up my glass, try to smile. “Cheers, then,” I say.

She picks up her glass and takes a quick sip, doesn’t even say cheers, it’s like she’s in a hurry.

“Why do you think you have such a difficult relationship with your mother and your brother?” she asks, looking straight at me, still smiling, but she’s on the attack, I’ve only been here a few minutes and she’s at it already.

I look at her, give it a moment, feel my hackles rising.

“Wenche, please,” I say, irritated now, but keeping that pleading note in my voice, a voice that’s begging her to stop. “Don’t interrogate me,” I add.

“I’m not interrogating you,” she says.

“Well, it feels that way to me,” I say. “It’s always felt that way to me.”

“Really.”

“Yes,” I say, managing a smile of sorts. “Being questioned like this, I’ve always felt like I was being interrogated.”

Silence.

“If I’ve questioned you it was only because I loved you,” she says. “Because I cared about you.”

“Yeah, I know,” I mumble, “but …” I stop, sit there shaking my head gently, don’t really know what to say, simply can’t take talking about this right now and she’s got no right to question me anyway, analyse me, I don’t need to put up with it, it’s her flat now, but still.

“But what?” She won’t let up, sits there glowing, waiting.

“I don’t know,” I say, my voice sullen now, resigned.

“It’s got nothing to do with interrogation,” she says. “It’s about closeness, the willingness to get close to another human being, the willingness to let another human being in. That’s what it’s about,” she says.

“Yeah, sure,” I mutter irritably. “That’ll be right!”

“That’ll be right?” she says.

I stare straight at her, don’t say anything, let her know I’m not joking, I can’t take this and it’s time she understood that. But she doesn’t get it, and she doesn’t care, she’s always been the same, she just won’t quit.

“See, this is exactly the problem with you, Jon,” she says. “Do you know that?”

“This?” I say.

“Yes, this!” she says. “The way you’re carrying on right now. The fact that you shy away any time someone tries to get close to you.”

“Is that so,” I say in that irritable, indifferent voice.

“Yes, I mean just listen to yourself. Listen to the way you’re talking right now. ‘That’ll be right’, ‘Is that so’, ‘Yeah, sure’, the last thing you want is to talk to me!”

“But we are talking,” I say.

“Yes, but not properly,” she says.

I pick up my wineglass and take a little sip, put it down again, saying nothing, just getting more and more irritated, feel my heart starting to beat a bit faster, my pulse to pound, why did I come here, why the fuck did I come to her, will I never learn. I should have gone to the cottage after all.

“Have you ever wondered why you’re like this?” she says, not letting up.

“All right, that’s enough now,” I say.

“Yes, but have you?”

“Okay, now stop it,” I say, a little louder this time. If this isn’t an interrogation I don’t know what is.

“Stop hedging,” she says, trying to seem less aggressive by smiling. “Couldn’t you just try to have a proper conversation? Have you ever given any thought to why you’re like this?” she asks again.

I look at her, shake my head.

“Wenche!” I say. “For the last time. I simply can’t be bothered discussing myself and my character.”

“No!” she says. “You never can, and you never could. And that’s exactly what I wonder – whether you’ve ever given any thought to that? Have you? Have you ever asked yourself why you never want to talk about yourself, why you never let anyone in, not even the woman you live with?”

I look at my feet, give it a moment, it’s fucking incredible, beyond belief, that she can go on like this, nagging at a person like this. I feel a surge of annoyance, give a loud snort and look up at her again.

“I thought there was something familiar about this,” I say. “Us sitting like this, getting nowhere.”

“Yes!” she says earnestly. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. What I’m asking is why you think that’s how it almost always ends up. Why does it stop there, why
won’t you talk, why are you so afraid of revealing yourself, showing who you really are and what you think and feel, why won’t you let anyone in?”

“Look … we’re different you and I.” I fling out a hand, pissed off, fed up. “Can’t you just accept that? Maybe it’s a gender thing, I don’t know. In any case, I don’t feel like discussing this right now. I’m exhausted.”

“Do you know what I think?” she says.

“Wenche!” I say. “Enough!”

“Do you know what I think?” she says again, not letting up. It’s like she’s not even listening to me, it’s like an instinct with her, this, the way she lays into me. “This fear of intimacy and of letting people in,” she says. “I think that this and what Lars and Anders call your negative attitude are two sides of the same coin. The same goes for the way you sometimes were with me when we were together. You know … my friends thought you were gorgeous and since then more than one of them has told me that she envied me when we were together … but when I told them how you treated me they didn’t think you were quite so hot. It was as if I didn’t even exist,” she says. “There were times when you treated me as if I was invisible.”

“Oh, really,” I say.

“Well, didn’t you? Even the way it ended. Out of the blue, almost as an afterthought, it comes out that you’ve decided to quit your job and go on tour and that you don’t know what will happen to us when you get back,” she says, dropping her jaw and spreading her hands, staring at me wide-eyed.

“I thought we were done with all that,” I say.

“Well, we are in a way,” she says. “But what I’m trying to say is that whatever lies behind this way of treating
people is also what lies behind your fear of intimacy and behind what Lars and Anders call your negative attitude.”

I look at her, try to grin.

“Been reading your psychology books again, have you?” I say.

She looks me straight in the eye, parts her lips, shakes her head.

“See, now you’re trying to dissociate yourself again,” she says.

“What?”

“The way you defuse and belittle what I’m trying to tell you by branding it in advance as a regurgitation of my psychology textbooks or something,” she says. “Isn’t that a way of dissociating yourself, isn’t that a way of preventing me from getting through to you and striking a nerve in there? No matter what I said it wouldn’t get through to you, because it’s all just a regurgitation of my textbooks, right?”

I don’t say anything for a moment, just sit there staring at her. And my temper rises, as if something is breaking loose inside me, something heavy, as if an explosion is on the way.

“Wenche,” I say, swallowing, trying to steady my breathing, trying to calm down. “For the last time, stop it,” I say, looking her straight in the eye.

But she doesn’t stop.

“There, you see,” she says, nodding at me vehemently. “Every time I get a bit closer to you, you do all you can to keep me at bay. Shall I tell what your problem is, though?” she says, getting more and more worked up, she’s off and running now, it’s like she’s high. “Shall I tell you?”

“No,” I say, shouting, pissed off. I stare at her furiously. “I realize you’ve thought a lot about this over the past
two months and that you’ve really been looking forward to telling me what my problem is, as you put it, but no, you don’t have to,” I say. “Put a double line under this answer and file it alongside all the other psychology assignments you’ve completed, but spare me. I can’t be bothered with this.”

But she won’t quit, she keeps going.

“Your problem is that with the best will in the world you can’t see how anyone could like you or love you,” she says. “You try to act so cool and laid-back, taking things as they come, when you’re actually the most insecure person I’ve ever met,” she says. “You try to make out that you’re the kind of guy who doesn’t care what people say, but you’re the most fragile character I know. You’re always on your guard, as if you’re just waiting for confirmation that nobody likes you. No matter how nice they are to you, no matter how pleased they are to see you, you tell yourself that they don’t really like you, that somehow it’s all just an act on their part! You simply can’t imagine that someone might actually like you, that someone might actually love you, and that’s why you behave the way you do. You refuse to let other people get close to you because you’re convinced that eventually it’ll transpire that they don’t like you, and the idea that people who don’t like you have managed to get really close to you and know too much about you, that’s a threat you just can’t live with.” She pauses for a moment, stares at me with those glowing green eyes, gooseberry eyes. “And that’s why a lot of people, including Lars and Anders, see you as being negative and kind of touchy. It’s exactly the same thing,” she says, “I mean, you might as well take a negative view of things and people right from the start, because that way
you won’t be disappointed, right? And obviously if you start out with that sort of attitude it’s hardly surprising that you also find it hard to show consideration for others, it’s hardly surprising that you treat your girlfriend as if she doesn’t exist, and it’s hardly surprising that you’re totally incapable of commitment.”

I stare at her, boiling inside, who the fuck does she think she is, sitting there analysing me even when I ask her not to, invading me, that’s what she’s doing, I feel the urge to get up and roar, yell in her face, make her face explode and her mouth crack, lean across the table and just bawl right in her face, but I don’t, that’s exactly what she wants me to do, wants to goad me into exploding so she can say that she’s hit the nail on the head, or something along those lines.

“Are you quite finished?” I ask with a strained grin.

“For now, yes,” she says.

“Good!” I say, and I don’t say any more. I pick up my wineglass and take a swig, put it down again with a careless smile. Stare at those green, bulging eyes of hers and her nasty rodent-like features, those thin, cracked lips. To think that I kissed those lips, that I could bring myself to do that, stick my tongue between those lips, the thought makes my stomach turn, every kiss feels like an assault, I feel sick just thinking about it.

“Well?” she says.

“Well what?” I say, I’m seething inside, but I merely smile, act confused, and I can see by her face that this gets to her, bet she wasn’t expecting this, stare at her rodent-like face, see her mouth fall open, slowly. She looks at me and gives her head a little shake.

“Honestly, Jon,” she says.

“Honestly what?” I say with a gleeful note in my voice.

“I’ve just explained to you what I think about something that concerns us both and that I feel it’s important for us to talk about,” she fumes. “I would have thought you might actually want to voice some of your own thoughts on the matter.”

I stare at her: those sharp, rodent features, the skinny figure, the outline of the sagging breasts under her sweater. To think that I could ever have brought myself to cup my hands round her breasts, squeezed those foul excrescences and felt them protruding between my finger and thumb, that I could do that. The very thought makes me feel sick. And that I forced myself to sleep with her, that I was actually capable of that, each time feels like an assault, and her questioning of me feels like a fucking assault.

“Don’t you think so?” she says. “Don’t you think I’ve a right to hear what you think?”

One beat, then I lean towards her, resting my elbows on my knees.

“You know what,” I say, saying it with a slight quiver in my voice, trying to maintain my cool smile, but not quite managing it. “I’m not going to say one word about what I think or feel about that matter,” I say. “There’s no way I’m going to play the part of patient just so you can practise what you’ve learned on your psychology course. I don’t live here any more, and if you want to start spouting all that fucking rigmarole of yours there’s nothing I can do about it. But refuse to answer, that I can do and that’s what I mean to do.”

Silence.

“You’re not well, Jon,” she says. “You need help.”

“No, Wenche!” I say, grinning fiercely at her. “I need a couch to crash on. The idea that I need your help is just wishful thinking on your part.”