I Refuse (20 page)

I got up from the desk, went into the corridor, opened the door to the office next to mine, poked my head in and said:

‘I’m going now,’ and they looked at their watches, I had only just come, they thought, a few minutes ago. ‘I’m taking the day off,’ I said, and then they said, go, just go, you’ve earned it, they said, the market won’t collapse just because Tommy Berggren takes this day off, away with you, they said, take the day off. But I could take any day off. I worked too hard, for long hours. I was well paid but my blood pressure was going haywire. I had to take pills.

And then back down to the garage in the lift, and when I put my hand on the bonnet the metal was still warm. I got in and turned the key, and the car started first time, it would have been a scandal if it didn’t, given the money I had paid for it. It was a quarter-past eight, and the police had rung me early, it was a shot in the dark on their part and they hit the mark. I drove through the centre of Oslo, alongside the railway line at first and a cream-coloured mist was drifting over the rails towards the Ekerberg Ridge, the same way I was going, like a river it rolled between the platforms and looked like something you saw only in dreams. And I drove into the tunnels beneath Vålerenga, Etterstad and further north-east, past Karihaugen, Lørenskog and the hotel called Olavsgaard, where the bar on the ground floor was known as the Last Chance Shed, and if you went home alone from that bar in the early hours, there was something wrong with your person you needed to do something about. I had been there a few times myself, several years ago, and when I left I was never alone.

After half an hour I passed the station where Jim and I had stood so often on the platform, waiting for the train so we could go to Oslo to buy records and clothes when we had money or just to walk up and down Karl Johans gate looking at girls in shorter skirts than the girls we knew had ever worn. I always had some money after the summer. Every school holiday Jonsen fixed me up with five weeks’ work at the Kallum Saw Mill, and there I measured the lengths of boards with a folding rule and wrote them down at one end of the boards with a carpenter’s pencil and loaded planks on to lorries and drove the forklift between piles of timber, and Jonsen had worked there himself for many years, at first as a saw sharpener and then at all sorts of jobs. At times he ran the mill almost single-handedly, on the floor, but also inside the office, where he wrote invoices and reminders and whatever was necessary when the boss was away, and he was away often. And I helped him as much as I could, I had a head for figures, Jonsen said, I thought maybe it was my only strong point, at school that is, I was good at maths, and at woodwork as well, and I was living with him then, from when I was thirteen, fourteen, and for a good many years he was the only adult I ever trusted, and in the end he gave me a permanent job at the mill.

But I didn’t turn off at that station. Jonsen had died a few weeks before this day in September, and Jim and his mother didn’t live there any more, they moved into Oslo as soon as Jim was discharged from hospital. Other people lived in their house now, and now the house I had lived in had burned down in May the year before, and everyone thought I had set fire to it. It was a long time before a new house was built there for a new family. The police sergeant died suddenly a couple of months after the fire. It was sad, it was something to do with his heart, it was too big apparently, and all this happened more than thirty years ago. Siri was in Asia now, in Afghanistan, in Sri Lanka or anywhere that children were in trouble, in Kosovo, in the Caucasus, she sent me a postcard now and then, and I hadn’t seen the twins when I was back in the neighbourhood to visit Jonsen, in fact I didn’t know where they were. That was not good of course, but there was nothing I could do about it. So I no longer knew anyone in Mørk I had any wish to talk to, and anyway I still had twenty kilometres to drive.

I had passed the turn-off to Lillestrøm, and the Skedsmo crossroads and Frogner, and kept up a steady hundred on the E6, you were allowed to now, the signs said 100 and then of course most people were doing 110 or more, that’s the way it always has been, I used to be one of them myself. Finally I turned off the motorway to the east in a long curve over the bridge and back west and into the village and along the main street and parked by the police station. I sat in the car for a few minutes. It was the right thing, to come. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t the other cheek. But I felt like ringing Jim. He could have gone in with me. We could carry that weight together. He knew what my father was like. How easy it was to think of Jim now. How difficult it had been, but when I saw him on the bridge and knew him at once despite the dark, the woollen cap, it came so suddenly I didn’t have time to be anything but happy. But I shouldn’t have said what I said about expensive cars, not to Jim, not if he was now the way he was before. I looked at my watch, it was gone nine.

Behind a counter sat a uniformed officer, wearing a light blue shirt with a golden lion on his upper arm, on the sleeve, just below his shoulder, and I went over and said:

‘Good morning. My name’s Tommy Berggren. I’ve come to fetch my father.’

‘Your father,’ the man said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my father. His name’s Walle Berggren.’

‘Walle. Is that a “v” or a “w”.’

‘W.’

‘Then I’m sure his name is Waldemar, that’s his name, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘I’ll write Waldemar.’

‘You’d better write Waldemar, then,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what you write. Anyway, you rang me.’

The policeman turned and called to a second man sitting a bit further back in the room, by a window, in plain clothes.

‘Finn. Have we rung a Tommy Berggren about a man called Walle Berggren, Walle with a “w”. Tommy Berggren says it’s his father. He’s standing here. Tommy is.’

‘I haven’t rung anyone,’ the other man called, ‘Maybe Jonny did. He left about an hour ago. He’ll be back this evening.’

‘Maybe,’ the first policeman said, turning back. ‘Maybe it was Jonny,’ he said. ‘But neither of us has rung anyone about someone called Walle Berggren with a “w”, and we don’t know what this is about. I can’t see anything here,’ he said, shifting a few papers, some forms, to and fro on the desk. A computer was humming in the corner. ‘Why would he be here.’

‘The man on the phone didn’t really say it that way, but I got the impression he was being held in custody. My father, that is.’

‘We don’t have any cells here.’

‘You don’t.’

‘No, you need to go to Lillestrøm.’

‘Why didn’t he say that.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he thought you knew. Aren’t you from around here.’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Well, if you say so. But, wherever you’re from, the cells are in Lillestrøm.’

‘I see,’ I said, ‘I guess I’ll have to drive to Lillestrøm, then.’

‘It’s not too far to Lillestrøm, not on the motorway, you can do a hundred,’ said the policeman in his light blue shirt.

‘I know how far it is to Lillestrøm,’ I said.

‘Right,’ he said, and I turned and headed for the door, and behind me he said: ‘Good luck. Hope your father’s all right,’ and I said:

‘I don’t give a shit how my father is, I’m just fetching him,’ and I walked out, down the steps, three strides along the pavement and into my car. My temples were throbbing. It was my blood pressure, I was sure of it. I couldn’t remember if I had taken my pills this morning. I probably had. It was the first thing I did in the bathroom, and the day had begun so well. With Jim and everything. Seeing him made me so happy. But now my temples were throbbing madly. I held both sides of my head. What I needed was a drink. But I never drank before seven in the evening, when the TV news was on. And never after ten. OK, maybe half-past ten. Between those times I drank a fair bit and sometimes I forgot my rules and carried on for an hour longer.

I started the car, drove out of Jessheim and back on to the motorway, and this time I was heading south.

I came into Lillestrøm via Kjeller and the aerodrome there and drove down the length of the high street and turned off at the railway station, which still surprised me with its fresh elegance, and on past the equally elegant bus terminal to the town hall. I parked where everyone else parked, it was not a good place to get a parking ticket, and I went into the foyer and over to the first man in a light blue shirt I could see and tapped him on the shoulder, and it turned out his shirt was a normal blue one without a lion on the sleeve, he was the school secretary, he told me, and had his office up on the second floor, it was a hell of a place to work, there were too many schools, too many silly headmasters, I wish you knew, he said, and deputy heads, Jesus Christ, but the kids were fine, that was why he kept at it, and he was a nice man and told me where to go. I had entered the wrong building and had to go back out, across the car park and a short cut to the next car park and across that and into the building called Justisen. I should have seen it straight away, there was a sign on the wall.

I opened the door and went in. It was quite full in there, and you had to take a ticket if you wanted to talk to the police, and people were standing around with the ticket and a passport in their hands, and were applying for a new one, or maybe wanting a police check for a new job, and they were sitting and standing all over the place with their A4 forms and inward gazes, waiting in total silence until their number came up with a pling. I took a ticket and stood for a while until I suddenly thought, what the hell am I doing, it was they who rang me, not the other way around, so what am I standing here for, and I went over to the counter where a woman sat with no queue in front of her and I explained why I was there, as I had done at Upper Romerike police station, and she said, just a moment, and picked up the phone. Shortly afterwards a policeman in the correct shirt with a lion on his sleeve just below the shoulder appeared.

‘Jesus, have we been waiting for you,’ he said, ‘just follow me,’ and I did. We went down one flight of stairs and along a corridor with grey doors on either side, like in a bunker, a sorry sight, and he unlocked one of those doors, and inside my father was lying on his side on a thin foam mattress with a blue plastic cover. I knew it was him because they had said it was him, but I wouldn’t have recognised him in the street. I would have walked straight past. He had tucked his feet up underneath him, and in the striped socks they looked like a child’s feet. But it was an old man lying there. His hair was long, and his beard long, and he was grey all over, his clothes were grey with grey stains on them, and the shrill light from the naked bulb under the ceiling struck his open staring eyes and flowed into them and was gone. You wouldn’t call it a reading light, you couldn’t read in that light, and my father had liked to read, Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of book. He read them late at night when I was in bed, and in the morning they lay open on the table, the spine in the air, and one was called
The Thundering Herd
, and another was
The Buffalo Hunter
and some had nice drawings on the jacket and others had golden hooves engraved in the light blue covers, and the ashtray was full to the brim with cigarette butts and the house was full to the rafters with smoke, it was seeping through each and every crack and you could smell it all over the house, even in the deep of the bathroom you could feel the smoke from his cigarettes, but you couldn’t read a book in this cell, you could barely brush your teeth. It was all cold and smooth, the shiny walls painted a yellowy cream colour or more like caffè latte, that kind of colour, but not in an attractive way, and there wasn’t a splinter of wood to be seen, no panelling, no skirting boards, nothing. The floor sloped inwards from both sides so any fluid you could think of would run in only one direction. In the corner there was a polished steel funnel cemented into the floor with a platform for your feet on either side, and there my father could go to the toilet when he needed to, but when you saw the thin, grey man on the thin, blue mattress with his child-like feet drawn up under him, it was hard to imagine that he would be able to squat over that hole, and as hard to imagine that the body of the man lying there was my father’s body.

‘What a place to put him.’

‘He didn’t come quietly,’ the policeman said.

‘He’s just a thin, old man.’

‘You should have seen him fighting.’

Then my father suddenly woke from his torpor and rose through the layers of floating space where he had found himself for a few hours and staggered to his feet, and as he straightened up his trousers fell down, because they had taken his belt, and they fell from his skinny hips like an empty sack to the floor, and he made a grab for them and caught them by his knees and behind his unkempt beard he smiled such an enthusiastic smile and said, but isn’t it Tommy, isn’t that my boy, he said, and he turned and said to the policeman, that’s Tommy, that’s my boy, he said, that’s my son, but he couldn’t disentangle his trousers. They got caught around his knobbly knees and hung there from halfway up his thighs and refused to fall down to his striped socks or to go up his hips, and he just stood still, unable to let go of his trousers and unable to move without tripping, or else he would have given me that bear hug I didn’t want at any price. That’s how he looked, as though it was the very thing he wanted to do and was on his way over, and it embarrassed me that he didn’t blush or feel any shame over his stupid trousers or the way he appeared in front of a son he hadn’t seen for so many years, but as far as I could tell, there was not a scrap of shame on his face, only this meaningless, indecent enthusiasm.

It all went quiet. He stood with his hand clenched white with expectation around the top of his trousers. What should I do now. And the policeman was waiting. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. He looked up at the ceiling to leave us in peace during this embarrassing moment between father and son, and he tried to make himself invisible, inaudible, but I didn’t want to be left in peace with my father. I didn’t want to be there at all. And yet I couldn’t leave without him. Anything else was too late.