Mum had made a casserole before she left, we ate it, chatted for an hour, then she went to bed. I stayed up to write but didn’t get much done beyond a couple of lines. She had rented the flat furnished, and I felt like a stranger there.
The next day we drove to town to do our final Christmas shopping. The sky was overcast, but the clouds hiding the sun were thin and straggly, my back was cold as I opened the door, stepped out of the building and for the first time in several months saw the burning globe hanging behind the clouds. Even if the colours of our surroundings were reduced to a minimum in which only the pale yellow of the grass and the wan green of the hedges stood out from the grey, to me they seemed to glow. There was no sharpness, there were no marked contrasts, no steep mountain peaks, there was no endless sea. Only lawns, hedges, estate houses, and behind them gentle friendly mountains, all muted by moisture and grey winter light.
In the evening Yngve came. It was his birthday, he was twenty-three, after dinner we ate cake, drank coffee and had a glass of brandy. I gave him a record, mum gave him a book. After mum had gone to bed we sat up and had a couple more glasses of brandy. I asked him to read the latest short story I had written. While he did so I stood outside on the veranda in the drizzle gazing into the distance, I was overjoyed to be home although the few signs of mum and her life that existed in the flat didn’t make the alienness any more homely, as one might imagine, more the contrary, they made the homeliness more alien. Seeing her things there was like seeing them in a museum. But then home was no longer a place. It was mum and Yngve. They were my home.
I craned my neck and looked into the living room. He was still reading.
Was that the last page?
It looked like it.
I forced myself to wait a little longer.
Then I pushed up the long handle and slid open the glass door. Closed it behind me, sat down on the sofa across the table from him. He had placed the sheets of paper in a pile. He was busy rolling a cigarette, oblivious of my presence.
‘Well?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Well, it’s good.’
‘Sure?’
‘Ye-es. It’s similar to the other ones I’ve read.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ve done six now. If I can speed up I could have fifteen ready by the time I finish at the school.’
‘What are you going to do then?’ Yngve asked, putting the somewhat crooked roll-up between his lips and lighting up.
‘Send it to a publishing house, of course,’ I said. ‘What do you reckon?’
He looked at me.
‘You don’t think anyone’s going to publish it, do you? In all seriousness? Do you think they will?’
Chilled to the depths of my soul, I met his gaze. All the blood had drained from my head.
He smiled. ‘You did, didn’t you,’ he said.
My eyes glazed over and I had to avert my head.
‘You can send them anyway,’ he said. ‘And see what they say. They might go for them, you never know.’
‘But you said you liked them,’ I protested, getting up. ‘Didn’t you mean what you said?’
‘Yes, I did. But everything is relative. I read it as a story written by my nineteen-year-old brother. And it is good. But I don’t think it’s good enough to be published.’
‘OK,’ I said, going back out onto the veranda. I watched him carry on reading the Fløgstad book mum had given him. The brandy glass resting in his hand. As though what he had said had no special significance.
Bugger him.
What did he know, really? Why should I listen to him? Kjartan liked it, he was a writer. Or did he also say that based on who I was, his nineteen-year-old nephew, I wrote well considering who I was?
Mum had said she considered me a writer after reading it. You’re a writer, she had said. As though that surprised her, as though she hadn’t known, and she couldn’t have put that on. She meant it.
But for Christ’s sake I was her son.
Surely you don’t think anyone is going to publish it? In all seriousness?
I’ll bloody show him. I’ll bloody show the whole sodding fucking world who I am and what I am made of. I’ll crush every single one of them. I’ll render every single one of them speechless. I will. I will. I bloody well will. I’ll be so big no one is even close. No one. No. One. Never. No bloody chance. I will be the bloody greatest ever. The fucking idiots. I’ll bloody crush every single one of them.
I had to be big. I had to be.
If not, I might as well top myself.
The sight of the pallid winter sun in the damp muted countryside continued to keep me fascinated throughout Christmas, it was as though I hadn’t seen the sun before it was gone again, what energy it brought, how rich the play of light on nature when its rays were filtered through the clouds or the mist or just flooded down from a blue sky, and all the endless nuances that appeared when nature reflected the light back.
Nothing had changed in Sørbørvåg. Grandma’s state hadn’t noticeably worsened, grandad hadn’t noticeably aged and the fervour in Kjartan’s eyes wasn’t noticeably diminished. Since last Christmas he had passed a philosophy exam in Førde, and now it was his lecturer’s name, rather than Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s, that was mentioned, at least they were not referred to as often as before, in that casual confidential way of his. I might have imagined we could talk about literature, but apart from him showing me some poems, hardly a word of which I understood, nothing came of this. He had also acquired an astronomical telescope, it stood on the living-room floor, beside the ceiling-high window, from where he studied the universe at night. He had also developed an interest in ancient Egypt, ensconced in his old leather chair reading about that mysterious culture which was so far removed from ours it seemed almost non-human to me, as if they actually had been gods. But then I knew nothing about it, and just flicked through his books when he wasn’t there and examined the pictures.
On 28 December I went down to Kristiansand, celebrated New Year’s Eve there, Espen had hired a room with some others at the Hotel Caledonien, which had just reopened after the fire, it was heaving with people, everyone was smoking and drinking, and it wasn’t long before two firemen came dashing along the corridor in full kit. I laughed myself silly when I saw them. I had been on my way up to the rooftop with some others, I sat on the edge and dangled my feet over, with the town beneath me and the sky lit up with fireworks. We talked about a crowd of us going to the Roskilde Music Festival in the summer, and with Lars I semi-planned a hitchhiking trip down to Greece afterwards. I managed to include a visit to grandma and grandad as well, nothing had changed there either, with them, the house, everything inside and its smells. It was me who had changed, it was my life that was on a wild trajectory.