‘Finn. Have we rung a Tommy Berggren about a man called Walle Berggren, Walle with a “w”. Tommy Berggren says it’s his father. He’s standing here. Tommy is.’
‘I haven’t rung anyone,’ the other man called, ‘Maybe Jonny did. He left about an hour ago. He’ll be back this evening.’
‘Maybe,’ the first policeman said, turning back. ‘Maybe it was Jonny,’ he said. ‘But neither of us has rung anyone about someone called Walle Berggren with a “w”, and we don’t know what this is about. I can’t see anything here,’ he said, shifting a few papers, some forms, to and fro on the desk. A computer was humming in the corner. ‘Why would he be here.’
‘The man on the phone didn’t really say it that way, but I got the impression he was being held in custody. My father, that is.’
‘We don’t have any cells here.’
‘You don’t.’
‘No, you need to go to Lillestrøm.’
‘Why didn’t he say that.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he thought you knew. Aren’t you from around here.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Well, if you say so. But, wherever you’re from, the cells are in Lillestrøm.’
‘I see,’ I said, ‘I guess I’ll have to drive to Lillestrøm, then.’
‘It’s not too far to Lillestrøm, not on the motorway, you can do a hundred,’ said the policeman in his light blue shirt.
‘I know how far it is to Lillestrøm,’ I said.
‘Right,’ he said, and I turned and headed for the door, and behind me he said: ‘Good luck. Hope your father’s all right,’ and I said:
‘I don’t give a shit how my father is, I’m just fetching him,’ and I walked out, down the steps, three strides along the pavement and into my car. My temples were throbbing. It was my blood pressure, I was sure of it. I couldn’t remember if I had taken my pills this morning. I probably had. It was the first thing I did in the bathroom, and the day had begun so well. With Jim and everything. Seeing him made me so happy. But now my temples were throbbing madly. I held both sides of my head. What I needed was a drink. But I never drank before seven in the evening, when the TV news was on. And never after ten. OK, maybe half-past ten. Between those times I drank a fair bit and sometimes I forgot my rules and carried on for an hour longer.
I started the car, drove out of Jessheim and back on to the motorway, and this time I was heading south.
I came into Lillestrøm via Kjeller and the aerodrome there and drove down the length of the high street and turned off at the railway station, which still surprised me with its fresh elegance, and on past the equally elegant bus terminal to the town hall. I parked where everyone else parked, it was not a good place to get a parking ticket, and I went into the foyer and over to the first man in a light blue shirt I could see and tapped him on the shoulder, and it turned out his shirt was a normal blue one without a lion on the sleeve, he was the school secretary, he told me, and had his office up on the second floor, it was a hell of a place to work, there were too many schools, too many silly headmasters, I wish you knew, he said, and deputy heads, Jesus Christ, but the kids were fine, that was why he kept at it, and he was a nice man and told me where to go. I had entered the wrong building and had to go back out, across the car park and a short cut to the next car park and across that and into the building called Justisen. I should have seen it straight away, there was a sign on the wall.
I opened the door and went in. It was quite full in there, and you had to take a ticket if you wanted to talk to the police, and people were standing around with the ticket and a passport in their hands, and were applying for a new one, or maybe wanting a police check for a new job, and they were sitting and standing all over the place with their A4 forms and inward gazes, waiting in total silence until their number came up with a pling. I took a ticket and stood for a while until I suddenly thought, what the hell am I doing, it was they who rang me, not the other way around, so what am I standing here for, and I went over to the counter where a woman sat with no queue in front of her and I explained why I was there, as I had done at Upper Romerike police station, and she said, just a moment, and picked up the phone. Shortly afterwards a policeman in the correct shirt with a lion on his sleeve just below the shoulder appeared.
‘Jesus, have we been waiting for you,’ he said, ‘just follow me,’ and I did. We went down one flight of stairs and along a corridor with grey doors on either side, like in a bunker, a sorry sight, and he unlocked one of those doors, and inside my father was lying on his side on a thin foam mattress with a blue plastic cover. I knew it was him because they had said it was him, but I wouldn’t have recognised him in the street. I would have walked straight past. He had tucked his feet up underneath him, and in the striped socks they looked like a child’s feet. But it was an old man lying there. His hair was long, and his beard long, and he was grey all over, his clothes were grey with grey stains on them, and the shrill light from the naked bulb under the ceiling struck his open staring eyes and flowed into them and was gone. You wouldn’t call it a reading light, you couldn’t read in that light, and my father had liked to read, Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of book. He read them late at night when I was in bed, and in the morning they lay open on the table, the spine in the air, and one was called The Thundering Herd, and another was The Buffalo Hunter and some had nice drawings on the jacket and others had golden hooves engraved in the light blue covers, and the ashtray was full to the brim with cigarette butts and the house was full to the rafters with smoke, it was seeping through each and every crack and you could smell it all over the house, even in the deep of the bathroom you could feel the smoke from his cigarettes, but you couldn’t read a book in this cell, you could barely brush your teeth. It was all cold and smooth, the shiny walls painted a yellowy cream colour or more like caffè latte, that kind of colour, but not in an attractive way, and there wasn’t a splinter of wood to be seen, no panelling, no skirting boards, nothing. The floor sloped inwards from both sides so any fluid you could think of would run in only one direction. In the corner there was a polished steel funnel cemented into the floor with a platform for your feet on either side, and there my father could go to the toilet when he needed to, but when you saw the thin, grey man on the thin, blue mattress with his child-like feet drawn up under him, it was hard to imagine that he would be able to squat over that hole, and as hard to imagine that the body of the man lying there was my father’s body.
‘What a place to put him.’
‘He didn’t come quietly,’ the policeman said.
‘He’s just a thin, old man.’
‘You should have seen him fighting.’
Then my father suddenly woke from his torpor and rose through the layers of floating space where he had found himself for a few hours and staggered to his feet, and as he straightened up his trousers fell down, because they had taken his belt, and they fell from his skinny hips like an empty sack to the floor, and he made a grab for them and caught them by his knees and behind his unkempt beard he smiled such an enthusiastic smile and said, but isn’t it Tommy, isn’t that my boy, he said, and he turned and said to the policeman, that’s Tommy, that’s my boy, he said, that’s my son, but he couldn’t disentangle his trousers. They got caught around his knobbly knees and hung there from halfway up his thighs and refused to fall down to his striped socks or to go up his hips, and he just stood still, unable to let go of his trousers and unable to move without tripping, or else he would have given me that bear hug I didn’t want at any price. That’s how he looked, as though it was the very thing he wanted to do and was on his way over, and it embarrassed me that he didn’t blush or feel any shame over his stupid trousers or the way he appeared in front of a son he hadn’t seen for so many years, but as far as I could tell, there was not a scrap of shame on his face, only this meaningless, indecent enthusiasm.