I Refuse (26 page)

‘No, I have to turn in early.’

‘Well, it’s on a bit late,’ Sandem said.

‘Yes, it is,’ Jim said.

‘Or else we could have watched it at my place. I’m on late shift tomorrow. There is plenty of beer in the fridge.’ He smiled.

Late shift, Jim thought. He was absolutely positive the neighbour knew he was off sick or at least had been. At some point he must have told him, but it wasn’t an issue here. Sandem was considerate.

‘We’ll catch the next game,’ Jim said. ‘Perhaps the Cup final.’ And he could safely say that.

‘That would be nice,’ Sandem said. ‘My wife’s not at all interested. She leaves the room the minute there’s a pair of shorts on the screen, and the kids are still too small. It’s boring always sitting there alone,’ and then he said:

‘You’re going out fishing, then, are you.’ He smiled again. How can he know that I go fishing at night, Jim thought. I haven’t told him. But then he remembered they had bumped into each other a couple of times early in the morning when Jim was on his way back from the bridge, and Sandem was on his way home after night shift. Then they’d barely said hello. Sandem was tired, and Jim was tired, and that was that, and he thought, my old reefer jacket must have smelt of fish, or the smell must have come from the bag, yes, definitely, the bag, that was where he kept the fish, if he had caught any, until he gave them away.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s my plan,’ but it wasn’t his plan. He didn’t know why he said that. It was stupid of him. It’s stupid when you say things aloud, he thought, they commit you, you can’t get them out of your head.

‘Good fishing then,’ Sandem said, and Jim said thank you, and Sandem said, ‘See you.’

Jim hung up his coat in the hall on the peg under the hat shelf that had never seen a hat, took out his wallet, took off his shoes and walked in his stockinged feet through the living room to the kitchen with his wallet in his hand and put it on the worktop and took the car keys from his trouser pocket and put them beside the wallet, and the wristwatch he took off, and he lined them all up in the middle of the worktop, and suddenly he was really hungry, it was like a blow, and he threw open the fridge door and grabbed two eggs and butter, put the pan on the hotplate, and by willpower alone, he made the eggs fry faster than they would normally have done and was on his toes when he was buttering the bread, and he only just managed to sit down at the kitchen table before he started to eat.

Then he did the dishes. And emptied the fridge. And washed it thoroughly inside and threw everything that was old in the bin and put the rest back. And he wiped down every surface in the kitchen and in the living room. And he hoovered all the rooms. And he put his books back on the shelves where they belonged in alphabetical order. In the bedroom he made the bed with military precision. At least he thought it was. He was tired again, and he was really, really tired, but he didn’t lie down. And he went back to the living room and looked slowly around him. There wasn’t much more he could do.

He sat down on the sofa with his pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, and flicked out a cigarette and a matchstick and lit the cigarette, and then he thought, but, Jim, wasn’t this the week you were giving them up. And then he had to laugh, but there was no one to hear him, so he stopped at once. He drew the smoke down into his lungs, and it tasted so good, and not once did he have to cough, and then he sat smoking until the cigarette was finished, and he crushed the butt in the ashtray with his index finger and lay back on the sofa looking up at the concrete ceiling through the blue smoke. To get something to hold in the ceiling, like a metal hook, he had to go down to the storeroom in the basement where he had his drill, a Black & Decker he was given for his fiftieth birthday, and then to find a sturdy Rawlplug he could knock into the hole he had made so the hook would stay put when he had screwed it in, but it was bedtime now for every single child in the block and they should have their bedtime stories read to them without the roar of a drill through the walls. So that was no good. It’s no good here, he thought.

JIM DIDN’T KNOW
how long he had been lying like this. Time was melting. He wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t awake, he was dreaming, but he didn’t know what he was dreaming. If dreams could be empty, could be nothing but a colour, then it was purple, the dream he’d had.

It was completely dark outside now and getting dark inside in the living room, it was late, or it was early. It was night. Only the lamp in the hall was lit and it sent in a slanting white light through the living room past the TV. He could see it from where he was lying, but the TV wasn’t on. And he stayed on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. Where else was there to look. Out of the window. Jesus, was he going to be like the old ladies sitting at their windowsills observing the lives of others.

He pulled himself up by the armrest and switched on the TV. What match did Sandem mean. Jim moved his thumb from one channel to the next. In the end he found Eurosport and the dying seconds of a football game. Manchester United versus Reading. That must have been the match Sandem had been thinking of, everywhere in this country there were people who loved Manchester United. But it looked like the replay of an earlier game, because the clock on the game and the clock on the screen showed different times. On the TV it was a quarter-past two. Anyway, the match ended in a draw, 1–1. The young boy Ronaldo had saved a point for a hard-pressed United, and here we speak of Ronaldo from Portugal, not Brazil. He was a great talent, and Solskjær was still in the team, and the fans were singing for him on the terraces, they sang, You are my Solskjær, my only Solskjær, and it was pretty moving, and he was about to cry again, and then he sat up and thought, Christ, I can’t take this any more.

He stood up from the sofa and went into the bathroom and filled the basin to the brim and plunged his face in, and the water flooded over and splashed all over the floor where he was standing in stockinged feet. He tried to keep his eyes open, but he wasn’t able to, although you could do it in the sea when you were swimming and were about to dive and you could see the jellyfish moving against the current and the seaweed swaying and the flounders rising from the bottom in a swirl of sand and settling some other place and letting the sand fall upon them and be gone. It is what it is, he thought, It’s over. He raised his head, and the water poured off his hair and down his forehead and down over his eyes and chin, and he thought, I said I would go, so I have to go. And really, it didn’t matter whether he was here or there. He dried his face hard with the towel, he felt sharper now, more alert. He pulled off his wet socks and dried his feet and found some clean socks in a basket. Then he went into the hall, and from the closet he took out the black bag and the pretty biscuit tin from Sætre Kjeksfabrikk with his fishing gear in it and put the tin in the bag, and from a hook on the wall he brought down a tow rope with a shiny carabiner at each end. The rope was old and had seen several cars come and go, so he examined it carefully, but the rope was in one piece and could take a ton or more on flat ground, though nowhere near as much when hanging from a tree, or a bridge, but it didn’t need to. He coiled it round his elbow and put it in the bag.

He dropped the bag by the door and went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa and took another cigarette from the pack and lit up and sat smoking it slowly to the end while waiting, and it wasn’t that he had changed his mind, but more that he felt relieved and no longer pushed for time. Sandem was on the late shift, so he was probably sleeping now, after the game and a couple of beers, and they wouldn’t run into each other on the stairs.

This time he coughed a little, but that was all right. He went into the kitchen, and there he washed the ashtray and placed it on the drainer to dry, and he took the cigarette ends with him on to the balcony and with his index finger he pressed both of them down into the window box and covered the hole over with soil. There hadn’t been a flower in the box for years, so there was no harm done.

On his way out of the door to the stairs he stopped and dropped the bag on the floor, and he thought, Christ, it’s the same thing every time, and hurried back through the hall to the kitchen to make sure all the hotplates on the stove were off and the oven was off, which they all were, but then he lost his composure and concentration too, and he stood leaning against the door frame, breathing in as deeply as he could, and holding his breath he counted to fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and holding it longer up to eighteen, nineteen, before slowly letting it out, and it made him feel so wonderfully hazy, like after the first beer in a café. He did it once again, and he felt calmer, and as he went down the steps to the garages he had to smile for a moment.

He opened the car door and put his reefer jacket on the passenger seat, and he stowed the bag in the boot, and of course he could have made it simple and tossed it on to the back seat, but why have the smell inside the car just because it was the last time.

And if you came flying through the night, quite still, like in a dream, like Peter Pan, and not as in a helicopter, rising with the wind along the hillside from the valley below at a good height above the woods and soar over the ridge to the east by the slalom slope, it would be easy for you to spot Jim driving down through the bends to Lillestrøm, and there wasn’t much traffic at this hour, so you couldn’t miss his car pushing a shining, yellow and white segment of light in front of it, and then again you wouldn’t really be able to see the car from where you were gliding, like an angel, just this illuminated segment moving without haste, with no visible source for the light. Right at the bottom, where the river ran into the lake, before the station with the car parks, Jim unexpectedly turned off from the Lifeline and instead drove through Lillestrøm to Fetsund over the wide plain with the river Leira flowing across it and on over the high bridge with the river Glomma far below and the old collection station for timber at the bank down to the right, and to the left the beautiful old cast-iron railway bridge, which also crossed the Glomma, and none of this you could see now, but Jim knew it was all there.

He turned south and drove all the way along Lake Øyeren, and it wasn’t especially late yet, or especially early, there was enough time to take a longer route than he normally did to get to Oslo and the fjord, and so he could sit in the dark of the car that was humming quietly through the night. But after more than an hour on the E18 it was suddenly later than he had planned. That made him restless. He switched on the radio. There was classical music on, a Beethoven string quartet, or so he thought, and it might have been nice listening, but right now it was what his mother would’ve called enervating. So he switched it off again. I am going to be late, he thought, it will soon be half-past five, and then he thought, Christ, late for what. You will get there soon enough, where you are going. And it was still dark, and after half an hour on the smaller roads he preferred, he finally came from Hauketo by the railway line and then a bit further on by the overhang towards Herregårdsveien. Just before Ljan station he turned off to the left over the railway bridge, the lights were red, but there was no one else around, so he turned anyway. When he was on the other side and further down the road, past the shop there they called Karusellen, no one plunged out of the dark into the headlights of his car, on the contrary, both sides of the road were quiet, nothing stirred, apart from two headlights on the way up towards him, and Jim was calm now and his breathing measured and fine, and he passed the other car very easily and drove down to Mosseveien and turned right at the bottom, towards Oslo and the white bridge, and he thought, I will get there soon enough, where I am going.

I REALLY HAVE
to tell you this.

I was going to Afghanistan for Save the Children. I had travelled on their behalf for some years and had worked among families in the remotest places and parents with one foot in the Middle Ages, with schools and sick children, and now everything was packed and ready. I had been to Afghanistan twice before and knew exactly what I needed to take and what was not such a good idea and therefore left at home, certain books, certain clothes, jewellery with certain symbols, a number of women’s things I won’t list here, but for professional and personal reasons I went to Singapore first, where I knew a man, that is, he was in that city at that particular time. He was Norwegian, he was a journalist, we had been together for a while some years ago. It had been nice, we both got a lot out of it, and after we had put the romantic part behind us and gone our separate ways, there was no bitterness between us. It was simply that I didn’t have the talent to share my life with anyone, and his talent for sharing his life with me wasn’t up to much, either. But when we met we shared a bed. And we met in various places in the world, after all he travelled, and so did I. The first time we met was in Sarajevo in the mid-Nineties, but not in Pristina a short time afterwards. And once we met in Libya, in Benghazi of all places, I don’t recall what he was doing there, what he was writing about, and we also met while he was married. She was from Geneva, he told me, and was a journalist too, but that never bothered me, neither the thought of the woman he was cheating on, nor the fact that he belonged to someone else. He was kind and clever and he was good at many things, I have to say, and I didn’t know anyone who could kiss like he did. I was a bit finicky about this. Ha ha.

But I didn’t go to Singapore on a caprice just to see this man. He wasn’t that important to me any more. If I had, it would have been an expensive caprice, and I didn’t have that kind of money.

What I also had to do in Singapore was supervise a large consignment of school materials and medical equipment which had arrived by ship and was going by air to Kabul. The little airline had suddenly got cold feet and didn’t want to fly to Kabul after all, they were worried someone might get it into their head to shoot down their plane. It was clear to me that they were more worried about losing their plane than losing their crew, because the crew was never mentioned. This was late winter in, not long before the shameful invasion of Iraq, but I can say hand on heart that in those days flying to Afghanistan was not dangerous. We had a constructive dialogue with several parties and we had a good overview of the situation. But what I said or thought made no difference to them and so I had to find another airline to accept the commission. It took time, but I succeeded. I had to run all over the place with papers and forms waving my Norwegian passport. But the real problem was that the first airline had just unloaded the cargo halfway between here and there, and now it was in three different places and knee deep in logistical quicksand. So it was my job to talk nicely to all the authorities, to get it all into one place and make sure that nothing disappeared or fell off the back of a lorry, and then assist the small airline, which, sorry to say, was a little uncoordinated, and then get it airborne as quickly as possible and follow on after all the loose ends had been tied up.