She had made up a bed on the sofa with a sheet and a duvet, I found a book in the bookcase, Johan Bojer, The Last Viking, read a few pages, then switched off the light and fell asleep. Next morning I woke to the sound of her clattering around in the kitchen. I got dressed, she set the table in the sitting room and brought in a plate of bacon and eggs, some tea and hot rolls.
We sat chatting all morning. Mostly about me, but also about her, about her relationship with her son Fredrik, who was having difficulty accepting that our dad had come into her life, about her job as a teacher and life in Kristiansand before she met dad. I told her about Hanne and my plans to write after I had finished gymnas. I hadn’t said anything to anyone because I hadn’t formulated the thought before, not in so many words anyway. But now the words just poured out of my mouth. I want to write, I want to be a writer.
When I left it was too late to go to school, so I caught the bus home. The sun was cold and hung low in the sky, the ground was bare and damp. I was happy but not unreservedly so, because chatting with Unni, being open and honest with her, felt like betrayal. Whom I was betraying I wasn’t quite sure.
A couple of months later, at the beginning of April, mum went away for the weekend, to visit a friend in Oslo, and I was left alone at home.
When I returned from school I found a note in the kitchen.
Dear Karl Ove
Take care of yourself — and be good to the cat.
Love,
Mum
After frying some eggs and meatballs for dinner, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette, I sat down in the living room with a history book and started to read. The countryside had not yet emerged from the strange interlude between winter and spring when the fields are bare and wet, the sky is grey and the trees leafless, nothing in themselves, everything charged with what will be. Perhaps it has already started to happen, unseen in the darkness, for isn’t the air slowly warming up in the forest? Is there not scattered birdsong coming from the trees after these long months of silence, which had been broken only by the occasional hoarse screams of a crow or a magpie? Had spring not stolen in, like someone wanting to surprise their friends? Wasn’t it there, ready any day now to explode into a blaze of green, spewing out its leaves and insects everywhere?
That was the feeling I had, spring was in the offing. And perhaps that was why I was so restless. After reading for an hour or so I got up and walked around the house, opened the door for the cat, which headed straight for the food dish, I thought of Hanne and before I could change my mind I was standing by the telephone and dialling her number.
She was happy to hear from me.
‘Are you at home on a Friday evening?’ she said. ‘That’s not like you. What are you doing?’
In fact, it was very much like me, but I had probably exaggerated my social life so much that she had integrated it into her perception of me.
‘I’m swotting for an exam. And I’m on my own here. Mum won’t be home until tomorrow. And so, well. . I was a bit bored. And I thought of you. What are you doing?’
‘Nothing special. I’m a bit bored too.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘I could pop by,’ she said.
‘Pop by?’
‘Yes, I’ve got my driving licence now, you know. Then we can drink tea and chat until the small hours.’
‘That sounds perfect. But can you do that?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be able to?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Come on then. See you.’
One and a half hours later she rounded the bend in the old green Beetle she borrowed from her sister. I shuffled into my shoes and went out to meet her. She looked completely out of place behind the wheel of a car, it struck me as she drove up the hill, driving required a set of movements and actions that I found irreconcilable with her somewhat gauche girlish charm. She performed every manoeuvre as it had to be done, it wasn’t that, but there was something extra which injected a stream of effervescent happiness into my blood. She parked outside the garage door and stepped out. She was wearing the black stretch pants I had once commented on, I had said they looked incredibly sexy on her. She smiled and gave me a hug. We went indoors, I made some tea and put on a record, we chatted for a while, she talked about what was happening at school and I told her what was going on at mine. Some anecdotes about mutual friends.
But we weren’t quite in synch.
We looked at each other and smiled.
‘I hadn’t imagined this when I woke up this morning,’ I said. ‘That you would be sitting here this evening.’
‘Nor me,’ she said.
A plane came in over the ridge behind our place, the whole house seemed to shake.
‘That was low,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, getting up. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
I lit a cigarette, leaned back against the sofa and closed my eyes.
When she returned she stopped by the garden door and gazed out. I got to my feet, went over to her, stood behind her and gently placed my hands on her stomach. She put her hands on mine.
‘It’s so lovely here,’ she said.
The river flowed past, shiny and black, it had flooded the football field, only the two home-made goals were visible. The air over the valley had thickened with the dusk. Lights shone in the houses across the valley. Droplets of rain ran down the pane in front of us.
‘Yes, it is,’ I said, moving away from the window. She was in a relationship, she was a Christian, I was just a good friend.
She sat down in the wicker chair, swept the hair hanging over her forehead to one side and raised the cup of lukewarm tea to her mouth. Her lips were perhaps her finest feature, they formed a gentle curve and at the top seemed to crimp as though not wishing to adapt to the otherwise clean lines of her face. Unless it was her eyes, which I sometimes imagined were yellow, because there was something feline about her face, but of course they weren’t. They were grey-green.
‘It’s getting late,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to go yet, do you?’ I said.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I don’t have anything special on tomorrow. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘When’s your mamma back?’
Your mamma. Only Hanne could say something like that, as though there were still a remnant of childhood in her that hadn’t been eroded yet.
I smiled.
‘My mamma? You make me feel like a ten-year-old.’
‘Your mother then!’ she said.
‘She won’t be back until tomorrow night. Why’s that?’
‘I was thinking I might sleep here. I don’t like driving in the dark much.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Sleep here?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be able to?’
‘You’re in a relationship for starters.’
‘Not any more.’
‘What! Is that true? Why didn’t you say?’
‘I don’t tell you everything, young man,’ she said, laughing.
‘But I tell you everything.’
‘Yes, you certainly do. But my splitting up has got nothing to do with you.’
‘Of course it has! It’s got everything to do with me!’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘No?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said.
That was a no to me, there was no other way of interpreting it. However, I had given up on her ages ago. She no longer filled my every waking thought, it was several months since she had.