Yours Until Death (7 page)

I could do one of two things: go back to the office or do
something
constructive. Or something which looked as if it were. The office wasn’t going to disappear and the only thing that could happen to the phone was that somebody would come and take it away because I hadn’t paid the bill. No matter what, I was better off not going to the office.

Wenche Andresen had said that Joker lived with his mother in the high-rise across from hers. Gunnar Våge had told me that Joker’s real name was Johan Pedersen.

I could see if he was home. I could recommend a course in Norwegian floral painting to fill his spare time. Or maybe an evening seminar in the history of the picaresque novel. Today’s educational system offers so many choices. If you don’t know something, you can learn about it and it doesn’t cost much. A little effort maybe, but that’s all. If you take a ten-hour course at the Free School or the Workers’ Information Association you can learn how to make the traditional regional costume they wear in Hardanger or how to handle a pocket
calculator
. Or you can learn how to paint almost as well as Edvard Munch or how to speak Spanish. Handy for your next trip to the Canary Islands when you want to talk to Swedes. Or you can learn how to take perfect back-lit photographs of your mother-in-law and screaming kids. So Joker had a lot to look forward to if only he were willing. Or at home.

I found the name on a letter box inside the lift room. H.
Pedersen, 4th Floor, it said, but I didn’t take the lift. I walked up. I was glad they didn’t live on the tenth floor. If this kept up I could cut out my weekly jogging.

Hildur and Johan Pedersen, mother and son, lived nearest the lift. The name was on the door. I looked in the kitchen window but didn’t see anything except white curtains which had needed washing a long time ago.

I rang the bell.

A couple of years passed but I can be very patient. I rang again.

A couple more years went by before I heard a voice from far inside the flat. It sounded like the stomach rumblings of a man who’s standing at the very end of the bus. No way you could understand the words. It was either a deep female or a high male voice. I bet on the first and waited.

The woman who opened the door and looked suspiciously at me had a face only a son could love. At first glance anyway. The next time I was short of nightmares I’d try remembering it.

It was a face which had seen too many nights and too few days. It was a face which had been through life’s darkest
corridors
and had never got as far as the daylight. A face you could like if you saw it on the far side of a dark room you were leaving.

Hildur Pedersen’s hair wasn’t grey or brown or black or red. It was uneven tufts of all those colours, and it hadn’t seen brush or comb for a couple of months. It stuck out in all directions like the mane of an ancient lion in a dilapidated circus. It was the right frame for her face.

Maybe Hildur Pedersen had been really pretty twenty years and several kilos ago. I’ve never been good at guessing people’s weights but I’d have bet she was in the one-twenty kilo class and about thirty of them were in her face.

Her eyes had sunk between folds of fat and her nose had to be at least twenty centimetres long for its tip to stick out at all. She had a mouth somewhere but it wasn’t easy to find it among all those chins. But one of them was painted red.

Her whole head, and it was a big one, rested on a collar of fat and the body under it was huge. She was an avalanche of a woman and I wouldn’t have wanted to be in her path if my life had depended on it.

She opened her mouth and I caught the unmistakable smell of cheap booze. ‘What do you want?’

A harsh but highly educated voice. As if she’d been born and raised in silver-spoon Kalfare but had never found her way home again.

‘A little chat. About old times. About nothing much.’

‘Who are you?’

‘My name’s Veum and I’m a sort of private investigator.’

‘Sort of? Either you are or you aren’t.’

‘Yes. Well. But it’s always embarrassing to come right out and say it. If you see what I mean.’

‘I certainly do. And if I went around looking like you, I’d really be embarrassed.’

‘You would?’ I had a lot of snappy answers ready but I didn’t want to be thrown out before I got in. And I sort of liked the lady. She sounded as if she’d be fun to play ping-pong with for half an hour or so.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me in to admire the view?’ I said.

‘Take your vodka neat?’

‘I’d sooner aquavit.’

‘I’ve only got vodka. No mixers. No coffee or tea. No milk. But there’s water if you get thirsty. Or there’s vodka. Tastes like hell but it works wonders. For a while.’

As she talked she began to ooze back into the flat as if she were being pulled by a powerful invisible force. But she left the door open. I took it as an invitation, followed her in and closed the door behind me.

The flat was almost identical to Wenche Andresen’s – except for the contents. The furniture was worn out. The chairs and sofas had held up too many kilos, the tables had been through too many drinking contests. You could see the floor through the rugs. Somebody had performed euthanasia on the plants in the window if they hadn’t died by themselves, and the
newspapers
under the coffee table were six months old. The team which had won then was now in the bottom of the second division. Where we all end up sooner or later.

Hildur Pedersen gathered up a half-full bottle of vodka and two dirty glasses, and sat down in the middle of a sofa which sagged like a hammock. She waved a huge hand at an exhausted armchair the colour of old pigeon shit.

For one brief moment I saw a glass-clear azure spring sky (the way the skies always are over our childhood’s sun-gilded streets) and a flock of pigeons flying. Over the low red roofs down towards Vågen and across Vågen toward Skoltegrunn’s quay and the America-bound ships. And lagging behind all the other birds, in meaningless helpless somersaults, a tumbler pigeon came rolling and spinning in the air.

How many times I’ve felt like that – like a tumbler pigeon, always lagging a little behind the others. Too dizzy to be able to get an overall view of existence. With that blue sky below me and the red roofs above, I went swerving through life from one temporary landing to another, just like the tumbler pigeon. And now I was in a fossilised living room with a dinosaur of a woman.

Hildur Pedersen poured neat vodka into the glasses and pushed one towards me. The coffee table between us was
yellow-brown
, covered with the pale rings of many a glass and bottle, small scars from years of cigarette ash and a varnish of dust.

‘Skål, Fatso,’ she said and emptied the glass.

‘Skål, Slim,’ I said and took a cautious sip as I thought of the car in the car park and about getting home today. Preferably not hanging from a tow-truck.

‘Spit it out. What do you want? Who’s sent you to old Hildur?’

‘Nobody’s sent me. But what I want is – Johan.’

‘Johan?’ She said it as if it were the name of a distant relative. ‘What about him?’

‘I ran into him recently. Accidentally, you could say. Or maybe he ran into me. Or to put it another way, some of his mates ran into me. He stayed in the background.’

‘What are you raving about?’

‘Always had problems with him?’

‘Problems? With Johan? What the hell do you think? Have you ever heard of anybody not having problems with their kids? Johan’s been a problem from the time he was a month old – and I mean for the eight months before he was born. But that’s how it is with most of them.’

‘His father.

‘That fool!’

‘You never married?’

‘I wouldn’t have married him if he imported vodka. Anyway, he was already married. A sailor, a happy sailor on shore leave in the big city. A real
stril
, a bumpkin from somewhere up in Sogn. Met him at the Starlight Ballroom and asked him home
to my one-room flat in the Old Quarter. Top floor, with a view right into the house next door. The fool was so drunk I had to stuff him inside me. It wasn’t what you’d call fun. But it was somebody to sleep with. Didn’t have to wake up alone. But I’ve got to tell you I was bloody furious when I found out Johan was on the way!’ She glowered at me as if I were guilty.

‘I looked up his address and wrote him a letter. Asked for money. He called the next time he was in town. He was so nervous that he almost dropped the phone with every other word. He said of course he’d pay. He’d give me as much as I needed. He’d be glad to pay for the kid’s food, clothes.
Education
. And there’d be no limit to it … as long as I didn’t send any more letters. He’d had problems explaining to Madame who’d sent the first one. But that was his problem, right? A man shouldn’t have a free ride with kids.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘Then what happened? What do you think? He’s sent money every damned month. I had to promise not to name him as the father, but I’ve got a kind of insurance policy running around here somewhere, if you get what I mean. Said he was going to send me money, and he did.’ She looked wonderingly down at the vodka bottle as if it delivered the money.

‘And Johan?’

‘Johan grew up. Not with the best of mothers, but at least he had a mother. He never went short. He got what he needed clothes, food, drink – until he was old enough to take care of himself. When he finished secondary school I said to him, now you’re damn well finished with school, Johan. Get yourself a job and earn the butter for your bread. And if it’s not butter, at least go for margarine.’

‘What kind of job was it?’

‘No idea. Ask him. I haven’t had any … These last few years we’ve … I reckon I’m done with him. He lives here but he might as well be renting. We don’t talk. He calls me a fat old whore. Won’t answer me. And I know why.’ She squinted drunkenly at me and poured more vodka into her glass.

‘Are you a High and Dry or something? A member of AA? Mother’s baby boy? Drink up and keep me company, damn it!’

‘Sorry. But I’m driving. Have to keep my head above water.’

‘So you’re old enough to have a licence?’

‘Got it the day before yesterday. Eighteenth birthday. I look over thirty-five in the photograph. The truth is I feel over sixty.’

‘Your tongue’s in the right place anyway.’

‘It is. Right between my eyes. Why does Johan call you an … old whore?’

‘Why do you think?’

I acted as if I were thinking, but she answered first. ‘Because I won’t tell him who his father is.’

‘Why does he want to know? I mean, any special reason?’

‘Ask him. If that fool had been my father, I’d have been better off not knowing. But you know how kids are.’

‘I can remember.’

‘They’re always wanting to know things that aren’t good for them. What’s going to become of them, who their fathers are. Things like that. The fools.’

‘But you haven’t told him?’

‘No. Not in – how many years is it – eighteen, nineteen? I’ve told him the same thing I told them at the Women’s Clinic. No idea. There’d been so many. And that was that.

‘But it wasn’t like that then. There was a lull in my life then. I’d just been … very disappointed. And so here came another disappointment – in the middle of my life. Nine months of
disappointment that never went away. I tell him, I don’t know, Johan. It could have been anybody. Can’t you tell me the name of one of them? he says. I say, I don’t remember. There were so many of them. Not all of them introduced themselves. Not many left calling cards and the repeaters came for the booze. Is it so strange he calls me a …?’

Her gaze disappeared into the glass and when she suddenly looked up her eyes were wet. ‘It’s a hell of a life, isn’t it? Veum?’

I nodded. ‘Every other day,’ I said.

‘Every other day? You’re damn lucky.’

I drank. Just for something to do. She found a well-used handkerchief and swabbed the upper part of her face as if she were digging ditches in June.

‘Have you seen him since – the father?’

She drank from the bottle now and wouldn’t look at me. ‘No. Why should I? As long as he sends the money. He got this flat for me – for Johan’s sake. Paid the down payment and
everything
. Otherwise I’d never have been able to afford it. And I would never go on welfare.’

‘What’s his name?’

Now she was looking at me again. ‘None of your bloody business. Why are you asking about this ancient history? Nothing better to do? Go home and play with your electric trains or something.’

‘You know Johan terrorises this neighbourhood, don’t you? Mention him, people shiver. Did you know they call him Joker?’

Her eyes were like furled umbrellas. ‘Who? Johan? That little twerp? I could mash him between my thumb and forefinger. If they’re afraid of him, they’re afraid of the evening breeze.’

‘It’s not just him. He’s got a fair-sized gang and they think they’re tough. Sometimes.’ Without meaning to, I felt my face.

‘He does have some mates who come here now and then. They sit in his room. Drink beer and smoke and play some bloody awful cassettes. But I never pay any attention to them. As long as there aren’t any girls.’ She suddenly looked pious. ‘I won’t stand for that kind of thing. Not in my house.’

I looked around her house. A picture hung crookedly over her head. A kind of painting of a kind of boat somewhere on a kind of lake. The proportions were all wrong. The fir trees on the far side of the water were taller than the ones on this side, and the boat was so big it took up almost the whole lake.

It reminded me of her. A boat too big for her little pond. A big woman whose life was all too confining. A life that hadn’t had room in it for more than some wham-bam disappointments, a money order every month and some ghostly old memories.

Faces without names, faces that hadn’t left anything behind but empty whisky bottles and had disappeared when the party was over.

I looked at her face. She was holed up in there somewhere. A long way back. The young girl of twenty or thirty years ago. The child who’d skipped up and down an alley, who’d bounced a ball against green-painted wooden walls along with other little girls but who later had kissed and hugged many too many and never the right ones.