See You Tomorrow (3 page)

‘Hey, Chessi? You there, baby?’

Rudi’s coffee-brown eyes move to glance in the rear-view mirror.

‘Hey, Chessibaby?’

No reply.

The old Volvo splutters out of the roundabout at Åsen, daylight streaming in the windscreen, and Rudi puts his foot on the pedal. If this is supposed to be a company, and this is a company car, then things are bad. When did they buy it again? Ninety-two. From an old farmer on Finnøy. The Volvo was in a field, under a tarpulin, sheep sniffing around at the edges. It only had 19,000 on the clock. That’s how old people are with cars, they treat them as carefully as they would money. Now it had done 270,654 and should have been on its way to Knoksen’s knackers yard.

But the Volvo is the same as all the other rubbish you lug around with you year in, year out; you grow so damned attached to it.

‘Hey, Chessi?’

Rudi takes another look in the rear-view mirror. She’s just sitting there. You’d be hard pressed to find a more pig-headed woman. One little row, Jesus, not even a row, and she won’t budge an inch.

His rasping voice reaches a higher pitch: ‘Hey, Chessi, are you there, or are you just sitting dreaming about rock ballads and my cock?’

She turns her head and looks out of the window.

That’s gratitude for you. A joke, and she looks out the window. Great idea bringing her along to work. It’s true what Jani says, that girl was born difficult. She shot out of her mum in December 1972, covered in spikes. She’s downright
spiny
. She’s always been pale
and freckly, rough and sickly and as ugly as an uprooted tree, but she has beautiful big hair, chestnut colour, and hips like shelves, as well as an ass that can make your head spin. Living without her would be utterly impossible.

‘Chessi?’ Rudi tries to make his voice sound like cotton wool. ‘Honeybunch? Only jokin’, you know that. Eh? Will we check if there’re any concerts coming up? I think Europe are playing at
Folken
soon!’

He allows her time to compose herself. But no. Her cantankerous gaze is fixed on the air in front of her. Those wide-set eyes, which make her resemble some kind of subterranean animal, seem to move even further apart. What about some compassion?
Yourboyfriendoftwentysevenyears, thebaronoflove,
is sitting here and she knows he hasn’t slept all night, she knows he has had awful nightmares, but is there an ounce of compassion to be had? Is there the merest hint of a smile? The smallest, kindly word?

Cecilie continues staring out the window while she takes out a pack of cigarettes. Fantastic. Now she’s going to punish him. She knows all too well he can’t bear anyone smoking in the Volvo. And she knows he’s just quit. And she knows how hard it is to kick the habit. Fantastic.

Rudi makes a show of rolling down the window.

They’re up and down, these moods of hers. You haven’t got a hope in hell of keeping track of them. Yesterday? Yesterday it was super smooth. Movie night in Hillevåg, good old
I Spit on Your Grave and Nightmare in a Damaged Brain.
Lo-fi classic night, said Jani, and put out crisps and coke.
Classic Night.
Jani has a way with words. They watched movies, good times and blood and gore it was, even Chessi was in a pretty good mood, lying there in an old pair of jogging bottoms, cuddled up in the crook of his arm. And then, next day? In a rotten mood. Everything’s shitty, pissy and crappy. When he’s the one, not her, who’s had a rough night. He hugged her, but her body was as stiff as a board. He tried to make eye-contact, but her eyes were yellow and fiery. And eventually he lets her know, that she needs to get a fucking grip and be a bit nicer. That was when the storm broke.

But, you got to go to work. No matter how menstrual the weather.

Rudi leans towards the open window, breathes in and out. Chessi sits in the back seat puffing away as if it were the last cigarette she was ever going to have, won’t be able to make out her head soon for all the smoke.

He drives through Auglend and takes a left at the southern end of Mosvannet lake, putting the car in a low gear, to get a bit of traction on the uphill climb at Ullandhaugsbakken.

Nicest place on Earth, as Granny used to say. God rest the old bag of bones, as Granddad said when cancer got her. She lay in her sickbed like a crumpled leaf. It was hard seeing her like that. Hi Granny, are you in there? Ah, Rudi, my boy, there’s not much left of me, you’ll have a slice of cake, won’t you? Come to visit your grandmother and get a slice of cake? It was always good to visit Granny. Shoot over to Stokka. He could drive there at any time, pull the Volvo up in front of the house, toot the horn, while it still worked, get inside the house and she would totter into the room wearing that blue dress, radiant as a wrinkly sun. Swiss roll and caffeine-free instant coffee. Yeah, you can laugh, be my bloody guest, but it was one thousand per cent genuine. If there were more people like Granny in the world, you’d hear a lot less about arguments, or the internet or war, that’s for sure.

Afeckingworldoffeckinglove.

That’s old times for you. They can really take hold.

Sometimes it’s a pleasure. Other times it’s a pain and they refuse to let you sleep. And you can’t do anything but curl up into a ball and wait for it to end, and as for a hug from your girl, well, you can forget about that.

The Volvo hauls itself up the hill in low gear. Rudi feels the hairs on the back of his head crackle as they near the top, as he sees cows grazing in the fields, sees the Ullandhaug Tower stretching up into the sky, and as he gets to the summit: the world opens up to the fjord below. He feels his stomach plummet and his head soar.

Rudi´s brown eyes warm up and soften as he drives into his old stomping ground. He feels likes a fag, but if you’ve quit, then it’s
all about standing firm. Stay clean, Lemmy. Metal, Motörhead and the old haunts forever.

This landscape, Granny.

You couldn’t describe it.

It’s true what they say at travel agents, you’ve got to experience it, you’ve got to see it with your own two eyes.

Rudi speeds up. He feels his head fizz and shuts his eyes for a few seconds, takes a deep breath, opens them again and goes for it: ‘Hey Chessi. You there?’ He tries to infuse his voice with as much lightness as possible. ‘Eh? You looking? Nicest place on earth, eh?’

‘Fucking shithole,’ says the voice from the back seat.

Rudi sighs. It’s the end of September. You’re at work. You’re on the road in the Volvo. After weeks of rain, along come a few days of glorious weather, as though a bonus summer had dropped by. You live in the richest country in the world. There’s food on the table, and money in the bank, maybe not piles of it, maybe a little less than Jani would like, but enough, and Granny is floating round your head like a crochet angel and life is actually pretty bloody good, and you decide to say something pleasant after a bad morning.
Pleasant
. Not asking much, is it? And that’s what you get. It’s enough to reduce your whole happy house to rubble.

‘Christ, you are a right bitch,’ says Rudi, pounding on the steering wheel with his fist.

‘Yeah, and when were you planning on treating me any different!’

He sees her shouting, smoke billowing from her mouth.

‘Well? What if I want a normal life, and not this bollocks, eh? Fuck’s sake, Rudi, you’re not a man, you’re a dishcloth.’

‘A dishcloth?!’ Rudi tries to keep his cool so he doesn’t explode. ‘A dishcloth? Whatthe … fu … a … fu … dish … what do you say that for?’

He glances in the rear-view mirror. Now she’s crying as well. Brilliant. Dishcloth? The tears run down one pallid cheek, trickle along her narrow nose, taking the make-up with them, it’s drama time again. Dramadramadrama. Weird how she only ever cries from one eye. Dishcloth? It’s exhausting, that’s what it is. They’ve been together for twenty-seven years now. They
know
one another.
They’re like one person! It’s like Jani says: she’s so dramatic she should start a theatre.

It’s not your fault, Rudi. It’s congenital. She inherited it from Mum.

‘I don’t know,’ Cecilie says in a low voice. And sniffles. ‘I just made it up. Dishcloth.’ She looks up, meets his gaze for the first time in a long while. ‘I do love you though, Snatchpuss.’

The Volvo trundles by the Iron Age Farm. Cecilie sits pale and freckly with her big hair and shelf hips, and the make-up running down her left cheek spreads out like a river delta from her wet lashes. Her thin, slightly crooked lips, her Easter-yellow teeth and her small mussel ears.

Rudi feels his throat tighten, his stomach swell.

Shit, how he loves that girl.

And shit, how he loves this landscape.

Here’s to you, Granny. They were good, those Swiss rolls.

He feels a draught on his neck and rolls up the window. He turns on the radio. Pop music. He’s about to switch it off, he knows how anti-pop they are, but he can’t. He’s heard this song before. Violins. Du-du-du du-du-du du-du-du. Something about a king who used to rule the world. Coldplay? He pretends not to notice the song and hopes Chessi won’t notice him listening to it.

Rudi leans forward in the seat, juts out his chin and squints. Now let’s see, he thinks, and reduces speed. Down the hill towards the forest. That was what he said. Down towards the shop there. Yeah. Park someplace behind there.

Weird set-up, this. Feels a tiny bit risky.

Keep your wits about you, Jani said. I’m not sure about this.

Rudi turns his head and looks at her.

‘Hey, Chessi, come on, we’ll knock this on the head. What was it we were arguing about, what was it that stirred up this lousy atmosphere, eh?’

‘Don’t remember,’ says the low voice from the back seat.

‘There you have it. It’s gone. Vanished! Hey, baby, it’s you and me and your ass! You know I’ll kill anyone who comes near you. You know you can count on it, count on Rudi whipping out his monster cock and flogging them to death? If anyone other than
Rudi screws you, yeah, so much as fucking looks at you, then I’ll break every bone in their body? Oh yeah. Rudi’s a real man! Like Granny used to say: I can trust you, Rudi.’

‘Oh Jesus…’ comes the voice from the back seat. ‘Here we go again…’

‘Eh?’ says Rudi and acts as if he didn’t hear what she said.

‘Nothing.’

He glances in the mirror. The tears have dried. She sticks the small, pink tip of her tongue out between her thin lips and moistens them.

‘Exactly,’ he says, fired up at the sight of her, and takes a deep breath: ‘Nothing and
kein Problem, Mädchen.
Now we’re going to go to work, and there’s no telling what we might run into in this forest, but Pål is this guy’s name and he’s got
ein problem
.’ Rudi frowns suddenly, as if he’s just thought of something. ‘Pål, you don’t know anyone called Pål, do you?’

‘Pål, eh, no, don’t think so.’

‘What’s going on, Pål shmål,’ laughs Rudi, repressing the thought. ‘There’s only one way out of here: piece by piece! like Slayer say. What’s gonna happen, Pålly Bålly? No one knows, baby! Like Foo Fighters say.’

‘Queens of the Stone Age.’

‘Eh?’

‘Queens of the Stone Age. No One Knows.’

‘Jesus. Are you gonna nitpick about that now? Who’s the dishcloth here?’

Rudi suppresses his irritation and says no more. They draw closer to the woods and the radio is playing Coldplay. It’s pop music. And he hates pop music. But those violins and that melody, they get into your brain, and the lyrics, they force their way through your body, and everything reminds you of that troll sitting in the back seat: He’s got to have it.

Because he loves it. And he’s a man of love.

‘Rudi, can you turn off that homo music? It makes me want to puke.’

Rudi pretends not to hear what she said, and raising his voice, making it sound like an engine straining at full pelt, says: ‘Yeah,
yeah, dishcloth or not, there’s one thing Rudi knows for sure, and that’s that tonight, Chessi, tonight I’m going to screw you seven ways to fuckin’ Sunday.’

A little girl, really.

Fifteen years of age. Her mum works at the church, her dad's a lawyer and she oozes naivety. She'll be sixteen in January. If she's telling the truth, that is. She might be adding a few months on to her age. Girls lie all the time, especially about things like that. That's the thing about them. The way they view the truth, it's not the same way we do. The truth is always changing with girls. Runs from their mouths like dribble from old people.

But they're so bloody gorgeous.

So, so bloody gorgeous.

It would be a lot easier living with a man, as his last foster father used to say, before he added: ‘Not that I'm a fucking homo.'

Homos. That's just sick. It's one thing to like boys, but not to like girls, that's even worse.

They're so bloody gorgeous.

When there are girls in the room, the rest of the world disappears. It just fucking explodes. There's nothing else in the room other than them. And it's a good feeling, like sniffing glue. Helicopter. Daniel has felt it a thousand times, and he wants to feel it again, because that's the point of this life: if it's good, get more of it.

More, more, more.

If you want to strip this scrap heap of a life down to its essence, then it's girls you're talking about. Daniel can sit behind the drum kit and play, he's a good drummer, a dynamic player, he's as tight as a sphincter, but in his head, while the sticks are hitting the skins, it's girls he's thinking about. They tumble around in his head while he plays. Big ones and small ones; fat ones and thin
ones, all kinds of girls. Tits, twats, asses, thighs, lipstick, tights, stockings, blouses, bras, dresses, kerchiefs, make-up, those straps between stockings and panties and everything that goes with a girl. It's been like that ever since he was a little boy. Ever since he was in kindergarten on the other side of the city. There were just as many girls going round in his head when he was playing then as when he was bigger, on the football pitch, practising penalty after penalty, and as there are now when he's banging on the drums.

And what is wrong with that?

Sometimes he gets the feeling people think there's something wrong with it, about life being about girls. But Daniel doesn't care about that. What he wants to do is get his own flat, whenever Child bloody Welfare will let him, work out a couple of times a week, get drunk at the weekends, play in a good band, get some gigs, release some records and get some stuff out on iTunes, YouTube and Spotify, maybe play a few festivals, maybe make a living playing music like Kvelertak, Purified in Blood and Kaizers Orchestra. Dejan's brother – crazy all that stuff Dejan and his family went through in Serbia – Dejan's brother knows a guy who knows one of the guitarists in Purified. Daniel and Dejan saw them at the
RÃ¥tt og RÃ¥de
festival, seriously kickass:
The sky is falling, death is calling, to the grave.
It's not just people in Rogaland who like them, people from Oslo like them too. He just needs to keep at it. If it doesn't work out he'll have to get a job, and he's no wuss, even though his grades aren't great, pass candidate in every subject except PE. He's never shied away from work. If someone tells him to do something, he'll grit his teeth until his jaw aches and do the job, no matter how bloody dirty it is.

Then he'll spend the rest of his time, and money, on girls.

That's what he feels is
meaningful
, as his foster mother and child protection officer say. And if anyone believes that's the wrong way to live your life, then they can just go on believing it. If they feel it's wrong that he thinks girls are so fucking sexy, soft and gorgeous, and he wants to buy them stuff, like houses and make-up and whatever they want, then they can go on feeling it's wrong.

Daniel's rock-hard fuckplan is to find a girl who's not a handful. She has to have her head screwed on and she can't have a face on
her in the morning like she's sucking a lemon, and she can't spend three hours deciding what kind of jeans to buy. She has to think the jeans he wants her to wear are the best. He'll be the one looking at her after all. That's the kind of girl he wants for himself. A girl who likes the fact he thinks she's well gorgeous and well sexy, a girl who doesn't look at other boys and isn't running around flirting.

Who knows, maybe he's already found that girl.

Because she is sexy, Sandra.

And she doesn't look at other boys. And she doesn't moan.

The test will be how often she wants to do it with him.

It'll be a shambles if he's together with a woman who only wants to do it a little while he wants to do it a lot. On average once a day, he reckons. So he can't be with someone who only wants it every four days. And there's one other thing that's just as important, and that's that she doesn't poke and pry. He's had enough of that already, from Child Welfare, foster parents, social workers and psychologists, so he doesn't want to be with a girl who pokes and pesters. Respect to Sandra, because she's twigged that. When something comes up in conversation that he can't face talking about, she looks at him with those well gorgeous eyes that make Daniel think of some kind of exotic bird, her lips glisten and it's just like there's light in those three freckles on her nose, and that little mousy mouth of hers drives him nuts, the pursed lips with the slightly protruding teeth, and she gets it, gets that there's certain things you don't want to get into. She's understood what all those childcare losers haven't: if you talk and talk and talk about things, pull them out of the ground like rabbits, then everything goes to shit.

Daniel glances up at the football pitch by the school. He takes his mobile from his leather jacket. 20:52. She's usually on time.

It's shite digging up things best left buried thousands of miles underground.

But the fact that they named him William.

What the fuck were they thinking? Were they at the hospital watching him pop out of his mother and did they think,
ah, we'll have to call him William.
Daniel
William.
What kind of gay name was that?

Daniel spits.

You get the life you're given, it's your job to live it.

It's shite with things that are best left buried thousands of miles underground.

Sometimes he thinks about it. About killing. Just going out and killing somebody. Making a person disappear just because he can. What a release it must be. Clench your fists until they're as hard as wrecking balls, pummel a face until you can't tell it's a face.

Maybe tonight's the night.

Screw.

Screw.

Screw.