I Refuse (2 page)

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You may be right. It is pretty strange.’

‘Fish biting,’ he said.

‘Not worth a shit,’ I said. ‘I guess it’s not my day.’

‘But you don’t need the fish, do you. I mean, for eating or anything, you know what I mean.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Because if you did, I could help you,’ he said, and I said nothing, and then he said: ‘That was badly put, I’m sorry,’ and his face went a bright red, and it looked like maybe he drank a little too much.

‘That’s all right,’ I said.

It wasn’t all right, but he was so important back then. We went through thick and thin.

More cars came down the hill towards the bridge, there was only one lane, so they queued up behind him, and inside one car someone leaned on the horn.

‘It was really good to see you, Jim. Maybe another time then,’ he said, and I felt a little uncomfortable when he said my name, like having the beam of a torch straight into my face, and I didn’t know what he meant by ‘another time’, or what would happen if there was. Then the tinted window slid up. He raised his hand, and the car set off, picking up speed over the bridge, and turned left at the other end, heading for the city. It was almost day now. It would be a clear one.

I wound the line round the bait rig as clumsily as I’d unwound it and tucked the last hook inside the roll and walked by the railings with the weight dangling and flicked the cigarette I had barely smoked over the edge, over the cable, in a glowing arc towards the water and put the rig in my bag and the bag in the boot and closed the lid and walked round to the passenger side, by the bushes, right at the end, and fell to my knees and wrapped my arms tight round my body and tried to breathe slowly, but I couldn’t do it. I started to cry. I held my mouth wide open, the noise wasn’t as loud then, and the air flowed easier in and out, and I didn’t groan so much. It was a bit odd.

It took time for the rushes of pain to subside, I had to get exhausted first. So I let it take its course. It’s strange what you can teach yourself. Finally I stood up with one hand against the car door, wiped my face with the other and walked back around the car. The others on the bridge were busy with their own affairs. Three of them were about to leave. I got in. I was the only one of us with a car. I didn’t know where the others lived, but I guessed it wouldn’t be too far away if they could walk. Or maybe they just took the bus, if there was one. One time I asked if anyone wanted a lift, and they all said no.

Across the bridge, I chose the shortest route home, which was straight through Oslo city centre although the queue was building up on Mosseveien. Then I had to go in through the toll gates, it cost twenty kroner, but if I had taken the simplest route to get to the bridge instead of the detour I now preferred, there was a toll gate on that side too, coming in from the east, so it was even money.

I drove out of town in the opposite direction to the one I came in, and in my lane, heading east, there was hardly any traffic and little competition for space. In the opposite lane they were all going in to the city centre, bumper to bumper, links in a chain, barely moving, while on my side I was driving into the tunnels by Vålerenga, Etterstad, and then out into the morning light along the E6 and off to the right towards Lillestrøm, past Karihaugen, and the entire Lørenskog area was under reconstruction, had been demolished and razed to the ground and was now being hauled up again with shopping malls and multi-storey car parks, and there were bottomless craters everywhere and cranes and hillsides sliced off like pieces of bread after the Solheim crossroads. And it was autumn already, September, well into it, and the few trees that were left in scattered clusters either side of the motorway glowed dimly red and yellow, and cold, damp air came rushing in through the open window on my way towards Rælingen Tunnel.

From the garage I walked the stairway two floors up to the ground floor and unlocked the door to the three-room apartment where I lived alone. I was tired. I stretched my neck and a few times rolled my head in a circle and took off my shoes and placed them with their heels against the skirting board, right below the coats hanging from their pegs on the wall, and hung the reefer jacket on one of them and put my fishing gear in a large metal box with a picture of a good-looking rooster on the lid, which had once contained a selection of the finest biscuits from the Sætre Kjeks factory and pushed it on to a shelf in the closet and went to the bathroom and filled my hands and carefully washed my face. I studied myself in the mirror. The skin was dark under my eyes, and my eyes were red in the corners by the bridge of my nose. I must have been driving under the influence. It didn’t strike me until now.

I rubbed my face hard with the towel and walked in my stockinged feet through the living room to the bedroom and peered in. She was still asleep. Her dark hair on the pillow. Her unfamiliar lips. I stood on the threshold waiting. One minute, two minutes, then I turned round and walked to the sofa and sat down at the coffee table and lit a cigarette. I could only smoke half of it. I would have to give it up soon. I could try this week.

I stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and stood up and walked to the hall and found a blanket in the closet and walked back and lay down on the sofa. My eyes were so sore. My eyelids would barely open and close, and the skin on my face chafed stiff and dry like a mask against my cheekbones. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep. But I did, and when I woke up she was gone. I tried to remember her name, but it was gone with her.

TOMMY, TOMMY! HURRY,
Tommy!

It was Tya calling, it was my mother, I could hear her so clearly, I remember that I did, but today I cannot remember what it was that made her voice hers, what made it different from others. It faded a long time ago.

I, Tommy Berggren, remember how cold it was that day, below freezing point, and I turned ten the day she called me.
Tommy, Tommy! Hurry, Tommy!
she called, and I ran down the flagstone path to the postbox and on to the road where I saw the stiff sheets hanging on the washing lines like stretched canvases in front of every house and they were just as stiff when the women took them down, they stood out like flags in the wind, like white flags, I surrender, they said.

I ran for all I was worth when I heard her calling me,
Tommy! Tommy!
she shouted, but I couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear where her voice was coming from. I ran in circles, round and round staring up the road, staring down, but there was no one out there on the road, and I ran down the path between our house and the next and further across the field, after the dip, and we used to play in the dip, Jim and I, because they couldn’t see us from the windows. And there she was, I could see my mother by the low ridges, in her grey cape between the birches, in her warm coat in Birch Woods, we all called it, and the crooked pine was the tallest and was split from the top right down to the middle and from there it grew up again like two completely different trees and the one didn’t know what the other was doing. Lightning had struck the pine tree exactly on the night that I was born, someone had said, perhaps my father said, but I didn’t believe it, lightning striking, on the day I was born, come on, there were no thunderstorms at that time of year, and later in the day Jim was supposed to come, he was coming after dinner, to have cake.

Behind Birch Woods the field went up to the ridge, and I ran as fast as I could, and our school was on the other side of the ridge, in Mørk, and we went there in the school bus every morning, every single day except Sunday. There had been a farm by Birch Woods called Bjørkerud, but now it was gone, along with the barn and hen houses and all the things you were supposed to find on a farm, like the tractor was gone and the plough behind the barn and the horse’s harness from the stable wall and the dog’s leash and the storehouse on pillars was gone and had been for all my living days, not a stone left standing. There was a pond there too, that had belonged to the farm, and there were ducks in the pond, or so my father said, he even said they had a house built on stilts in the water, a little house, the ducks’ house that is, when the farm was a farm. And what was more, the people who lived on the farm used the greenish water in the pond as their drinking water, my father said, and it sounded so sickening with the ducks swimming around in the green water doing all kinds of things in it, that anyone could drink that water.

And that’s what I was thinking about as I raced away, that someone had drunk that devilish green water. I could see it before me as I ran, I could see them drinking it, their mouths opening to the glass, and it was from down by the pond that my mother was calling me,
Tommy! Tommy!
she called,
Hurry! Hurry! He’s drowning!
And then I pushed myself even harder, and I couldn’t feel my feet touching the ground, but of course they were, my feet, they were touching the ground, I couldn’t fly for God’s sake, but on the path down to the pond they were lost to me, for there was someone drowning and my mother couldn’t swim.

It was a dog. It was Lobo in the water. I saw his dark head, and his grey beard, just sticking up from the pond, and he was stretching his neck for all he was worth. He looked so tired, he was old and his legs were so full of rheumatism that the joints could hardly bend, and every single day he made the trip up to the Slettens’ house on his four stiff legs to get a good sniff at close range and find out if their bitch was on heat. It took him twenty minutes up and twenty minutes down, and the bitch
was
on heat, she was on heat about twice a year, on the dot, like all bitches of the right age were, but Lobo had trouble mounting her from the rear, and it didn’t look stylish, no, it did not. Besides, he didn’t have it in him, everyone knew that, and no one could be bothered to chase him away, why would they. Let the dog have some fun for God’s sake, Sletten said, his days are numbered.

He had a pistol in the kitchen drawer, my father said. Sletten had.

She couldn’t swim, but Lobo couldn’t either, not with those sticks for legs, and I ran straight past her in her grey coat and threw myself into the pond. A thin sheet of ice had settled on the water overnight and was still there, and I hit it and it cracked around me like flatbread, and the water was cold, cold, cold. I grabbed his collar with one hand and was treading the green water and it wasn’t easy, moving forward with my shoes on, and my clothes, and Lobo’s feet couldn’t touch the bottom of the Bjørkerud pond and neither could mine. It was slippery, and sticky, and I had to drag him as I swam, and a few times I tried to push off with the tips of my toes, like I did when I took my swimming badge, but I couldn’t reach and Lobo couldn’t help me. He tried, but his body was like an anchor, a dead weight I had to pull through the water, and his black coat was short, so he must have been frozen stiff, Lobo, like the rest of him was stiff. I was just a boy then, he was older than me, but we had never been friends. I thought he was shifty, a sneaky lurker always on the lookout for a screw, and what the hell were you doing in the pond, I said, were you thirsty, Lobo, and I was so fond of that dog, I really was, I wouldn’t have been without him, not for a single day, and why did you come here for a drink, Lobo, I said, were you so thirsty, I said, was it too far to walk home.

At long last I felt solid ground beneath my feet, and I hauled Lobo up the muddy slope at the end of the pond where the double pine was holding on tight with its long, gnarled and twisted roots, and my teeth were chattering beyond control, and they grew bigger in my mouth, and Lobo keeled over on to the grass like a block of wood. He was breathing in long gasps with a whistle at the back of his throat. Soon he would draw his last breath, a few more gasps and he was done for, no question about it. But then he just kept breathing, and I stood up in my sodden clothes. I was so cold. Everything was a sticky green, there were sticky green stripes across my wet, blue jumper, and in my mouth there wasn’t room for one more tooth, and my mother said to me,
There’s a good boy, Tommy
.

THE TELEPHONE RANG
in my office. I had just taken the lift from the garage and got out on the ninth floor in the new high-rise in Oslo close to the harbour front. I was still thinking about Jim. The bag. The reefer jacket. The dark woollen cap. Once upon a time his clothes had been so stylish, he was the first to have long hair out where we lived, the first to wear flared hipster pants, a reefer jacket and a neckerchief. A long-haired sailor on dry land. He looked fantastic.

It was Upper Romerike police district calling. I said:

‘Hello, this is Tommy.’

I was a bit out of breath, I hadn’t run a metre. I drank too much, that was why.

‘Could you come up here and collect your father.’

‘I don’t think my father’s alive,’ I said, and the policeman said:

‘He’s not so sprightly at the moment, I’ll give you that, but he’s not dead.’

‘Are you certain it’s
my
father,’ I said. ‘How can you know,’ and the policeman said:

‘Who else could it be.’

I had been so sure he was dead. I tried to work out how old he might be now. Seventy-five, maybe. Or even older. So he was alive. It was hard to imagine.

Back then, in 1966, we lived in Mørk. My father was a dustman. He worked on a dustcart. He was the man who stood on the footplate with his hands in gloves and the gloves round the steel bar at the back where the shiny, curved shutter door slammed down like a huge bureau top when the cart drove off, and creaked open when my father jumped from the footplate and the dustcart still moving, and him running into the sheds or along the kerb where most of the bins were. He pulled the square hundred-litre metal bins out or dragged them across the gravel and hoisted them up on to his shoulder and poured what was in them into the back of the cart and ran back with the empty bins to fetch more. Sometimes he took two at once, one in each hand, and hoisted them on to his shoulders in one parallel movement and walked over to the cart and leaned forward in a towering bow so that the garbage poured out on either side of his head. I had seen him do it many times. To me it was a disgusting sight.