I sat there for twenty minutes. Or more. It was probably not so unusual.
My caseworker was also young, not much more than thirty-five, maybe younger, but it was of no consequence to me inside his office in the corridor behind what you might call the sluice gate. I didn’t get upset, and he said what I knew he would say, that now, after a year, I was not entitled to any more sickness benefit, and I said I knew, and he said that now some decisions would have to be made and from now on they would be obliged to keep a closer eye on me, as he was sure I understood, and the task we had to resolve, the Social Security staff and me, and after that the Job Centre, was to get me back to work as quickly as possible, because of course now I wasn’t ill any longer, I was unemployed. But then I said that, strictly speaking, I could have any job I wanted, at least within the Norwegian library service, and probably other jobs in that field or in fields like it, and then he said, yes, that may be the case, but right now you are here, and you are not working in that area or any other, and then I said that was because I was on sick leave, that’s why, I said, and then he got irritated and said that he was fully aware of that, it was why I was here, he said, and I said, yes, precisely. Are you trying to be funny, he said, and he could sit there saying that and being twenty years younger than me, are you after benefits, he said. What, I said, what do you mean am I after benefits. Are you after a disability benefit, he said, disability benefit, I said, am I an invalid, I said, do I seem like an invalid to you. No, he said, not really, good, I said, because I’m not an invalid, and I don’t know what he was thinking as he sat there, twenty years younger than me, did he think I was quarrelsome, cantankerous, a troublemaker. He might well have done, but I was none of those things because what I said, I said calmly. I wasn’t nervous now, I wasn’t sitting ramrod straight with my knees together, on the contrary, my body felt relaxed, and free, and I was sitting quietly on the chair with my arms on the rests, without a twitch on my face, truthfully answering the questions he asked, and I wasn’t trying to be funny, or, well, perhaps a little funny, because that’s what it was now, in here, a little funny. I thought it was. What he didn’t get, I thought, was how relaxed I felt, how little tension I felt, and free and easy and not after anything at all. Absolutely nothing. It was a bit of a surprise to me too, in fact, because I hadn’t really seen it from that angle before, or if I had, it was long ago. I smiled, and he suddenly smiled back, and I thought, I don’t have to keep doing this. I don’t.
‘Here,’ he said, placing three forms one on top of the other and pushing them across the desk. ‘Would you mind filling in these and taking them with you to the Job Centre.’ He smiled. I smiled back. I took the forms and stood up, put them into my left hand and shook his hand with my right.
‘This will all be fine,’ he said, and I smiled.
I closed his office door behind me, and walked up the corridor feeling very calm, and around the desk where the young woman sat. She turned, looked at me and said:
‘That wasn’t so bad, was it.’
I smiled. She smiled back and she was very young and enthusiastic all of a sudden, and I walked past her between the tables where the men were still sitting hunched over their forms on every chair, and I dropped my own forms into a paper basket so conveniently placed beside one of the tables, and on to the door, which I opened, and I was out on the stairwell. I could feel how I was still smiling, so I stopped.
SIRI ⋅ 1970
NOTHING CAME OF my sea-going plan. I had told Tommy I was going and I meant it. I had been so confident, so determined, I had felt there was no other way out, and I knew where to turn and who would help me leave. I wasn’t the only person in Mørk who wanted to go to sea, I knew several who had gone already. But I hadn’t sworn an oath.
Tommy didn’t need me, I was sure of that. So it wasn’t because of him that I stayed home. On the contrary, I think he found it harder to see me as often as he did before, because everything was different after the evening he sat beside me crying behind the Co-op by Lake Mørk in the cold and dark, and all of a sudden it was me who had to comfort him and not the other way around.
He didn’t come to Mørk on the Wednesday evening, two days later. He had said he would. I had stood by Lysbu’s green pumps waiting, and I was a little nervous and unsure of which Tommy I would be meeting, whether it was the new, sad Tommy, in which case I would have to pull myself together and show tenderness and leadership, or the old Tommy, the one standing at the helm. But I didn’t see him that evening, and he didn’t come on Thursday either. I had stood at the petrol station by the green pumps waiting for an hour every evening until the weekend was over, and at last he was there with his bike on the Monday, and we walked down to the lake as usual and sat on our rocks, but he didn’t stay long. He was restless and distracted, and the conversation we had was going nowhere. After that he came less and less often.
Time passed. I changed. I could feel it myself. From my window on the first floor of the house where I lived with the Lydersens, I could see the BP station through an alleyway between the Old People’s Home and Mørk Machinery. I saw cars driving in and out again with their tanks full and sometimes I saw old Lysbu come from the shop into the daylight or the evening’s lamplight to help drivers who were in trouble, who had never once looked under their car bonnets or changed their windscreen wipers, and then he would go out of my field of vision and return a little later, on his way to the door. I don’t know why the sight of Lysbu always had a calming effect on me, as though nothing could be all bad as long as he was here, whether it was something to do with his body and the placid, unruffled way he moved or his equally placid voice, or his gaze, and I wondered sometimes whether anyone else felt the same way about him as I did. For years Lysbu had said he wanted to move, he was truly sick of the place, he said, of Mørk, but he was still here, and it made me happy. It was hard to imagine that one day he might be gone. If you could picture Mørk as a big wheel, maybe a bicycle wheel, with its shiny spokes pointing in all directions, Lysbu was the hub. For me at least.
If someone had been standing by the pumps, waiting under those lamps at night, or in the daytime, as now, in spring, it would also have been easy for me to see them from my window.
On this evening in May I was going up to Valmo for handball training. It was my first session. It was important, I had made a lot of friends. After long hesitation and thinking about Tommy and the twins and our house and our lives in that house, I had to make a decision, and then I just dived in. Instead of going to sea when I was sixteen, I finished school in Valmo so that I could start at the gymnas in the autumn, and to everyone’s surprise, in no time at all I was top of the class, and now several of the other girls wanted me to play up front in the school handball team. And I said I would love to. I had barely touched a handball, but I knew right away I was going to be good. Everyone did. That was why they asked. For a while everything I touched turned to gold. In the playground, Jackman, our gym teacher, said to me, you’re riding a green wave now, which was supposed to have something to do with traffic lights and cars, but we didn’t have traffic lights in Mørk and never would. Make the most of this time, he said. Later in life you’ll be glad you did. And I did make the most of it. I wanted to move on.