At the top, near the dam, the bikes were leaned against the railings and they stood by the bikes and leaned against the railing and looked down into the waterfall, and Tommy ran his fingers carefully over the eyebrow and the long gash along it, and over the scabs on his cheek and said, sometimes you feel like jumping, don’t you, just jumping over and sailing out like a bird. I know, Jim said, just climb up on to the railings and dive. My mother says it isn’t dangerous to jump off and fly, you can jump off a skyscraper if you like, and it isn’t dangerous. It’s the landing that’s a problem. I’ve heard that one before, Tommy said. I know, Jim said. Everyone’s heard it.
They mounted their bikes and pedalled round the bends along the river, a very small river, but it was their river, Beaver Beck, it was called even though it was much bigger than a beck. There had been beavers in it before, there weren’t any now. Only the old people in the district could remember seeing beavers. It was bad, the old people said, you should have been here, we saw beavers felling birches as tall as tower blocks in the city, and they just ate a few shoots from the crown and then they started gnawing at a new one, and the trees were left to rot. It was a sorry sight, a great shame, the old people said, so much firewood down the drain, it’s good they’re gone, those damn beavers, I’ve shot a few myself, one old-timer said. But Jim and Tommy would have liked to see at least one beaver fell a tree, it would have been interesting to find out how long it took, and then they came in to Mørk from the south and not from their usual side, and turned into the BP station and parked their bikes between the pumps and went into the kiosk with the money they had in their pockets to buy a Krone ice cream. It was June and hot, and Tommy’s father had been swept off the face of the earth. No one had seen him since the day after Whit, and no one understood how he could have left with that leg of his, and without anyone seeing him. When the four children returned to the house the day after, he was gone, and everything was as they had left it, the toppled tables and chairs in the living room, a vase was on the floor cracked into sky blue pieces, pictures hanging crookedly on the walls, and the glass in one of them smashed. The rounders bat still on the floor. Everyone knew about Tommy and the bat. Everyone knew about his father’s leg.
How’s the face, the man behind the counter said, does it still hurt. No, it’s fine, Tommy said. It wasn’t of course, it still hurt, but the man said, have this too, and as well as the ice cream, he gave Tommy a free bar of Kvikk Lunsj chocolate. Eat it now, the man, said, and to hell with dinner, it won’t hurt you this one time. Thanks, Tommy said, but maybe I’ll keep it for tonight, it’s crime-time on TV. That’s fine, too, the man said, his name was Lysbu, you’ll manage, he said. It will soon be sorted out and then you’ll be free of it all. You can eat with us, Jim said, we’re having perch, I caught it myself. Right, Tommy said, what will your mother say about me coming. She’s a Christian, Jim said, she can’t say no. That would have been great, but I can’t. Siri and I have to cook for the twins, we’ll be fine, I found a little money, we’ve been shopping, so we have food. You’ll soon be free of all this, Lysbu said. It makes no difference to me, Tommy said, we’ll manage. Thanks for the chocolate, that was decent of you, he said, and in fact he would rather have said no, thank you, he didn’t want anything from anybody, but Lysbu wasn’t like most grown-ups, he actually listened to what you were saying.
When they were out by the pumps, Tommy took off the chocolate wrapper and split the bar into two equal parts, two fingers each with biscuit inside the chocolate and passed Jim one half, but Jim said, you can all have a finger each tonight at crime-time like you just said, there are four of you, right. Tommy looked at Jim, he looked down at the chocolate. It was soft to the touch. He smiled. It’s going to melt anyway, he said. Let’s eat it now. And Jim took his bit willingly, and then they ate the chocolate, and behind them Lysbu stood by the counter watching them through the window as they got on their bikes, the left hand holding the ice cream and the right hand on the handlebars, and turning out between the petrol pumps. He shook his head. It will all be sorted out, he said aloud. It has to be.
Then he went into the workshop. There was Jonsen’s Opel Kapitän, the paintwork gleaming, not a scrap of rust, but Jonsen couldn’t fix anything on the car himself, he couldn’t tighten a nut, couldn’t change a spark plug, he could fix just about anything in this world, but not on a car. The few times Jonsen lifted the bonnet his mind went blank and he slammed it back down and then he delivered the car to Lysbu at the BP garage if there was something wrong, and as a rule there was very little wrong, only some trivial thing that Jonsen could have fixed himself in a couple of minutes if for once in his life he had taken the time to look. And what would he do now that Lysbu was about to retire. It wasn’t far off, he was sick of the whole business, of loudmouthed women with weightlifters’ biceps and bandits like Tommy Berggren’s father, of shitty cars, of Wartburgs and Skodas, of threshing machines and Volvo lorries racing to the mill at a hell of a speed and back home again, sending the swirling dust up from the flatbeds of their open trailers and into his house and blocking the roads when they stopped for the drivers to talk with their window open, and they didn’t even bother to pull over. He was sick of wily farmers he wasn’t even able to talk to without getting confused and furious, he would never get used to how they made conversation, never going straight to the point, forever beating around the bush in evasive circles, always with a cunning grin on their faces, he was from Sarpsborg, he didn’t get it, there was always something funny and he never got the goddamn joke. So it was over now, he was going to retire and move to Oslo, to his sister’s, at Lakkegata 7, by the Akerselva river and Schous Brewery with its large, shiny copper vats inside, you could see them through the windows as you walked past on Trondheimsveien. Jesus, was he looking forward to that.
They cycled off. It was a Friday, it was crime-time tonight, and the ride home was summer all the way, and holidays were only two weeks off and everything was green as the meadows were green, and the leaves of the birch trees were green as the spruce trees were green, and wherever you turned to look in this world everything was as green as every other thing was green, and the fields were green and not golden as they were in the early autumn. Tommy had started school again, he had been away since the day after Whit, and for the first week he saw the world through one eye only. The doctor in Mørk came out and did his stitches and left again, and no one but Jim was let in to help now that the girls and Tommy were alone in the house. The sergeant from the district police station came out and had to leave again, we will get this thing sorted out, he said, this is no good, you just wait, he said, but he couldn’t get past the threshold to see how they were doing inside the house, he couldn’t get past Tommy. Goddamn that boy, he said on his way to the car, how the hell are we going to deal with him. And Tommy didn’t budge and not one of the neighbours dared go anywhere near. So they walked up and down the road and went in and out of their houses and went to work in the morning and came back and had dinner and watched TV in the evening, watched The High Chaparral on the Swedish channel at half-past seven if it was a Saturday night, and Victoria had such pretty teeth, someone said, maybe Sletten said, and it was a strange thing to say, even though it was true, that she had beautiful teeth. You could see them when she smiled, it was really something, and no one in Mørk had teeth like hers, and whenever a neighbour passed on the road down by the stone path and the dustbins, he would look up at the windows in the house where the whole Berggren family had once lived, where only Tommy and his sisters lived now. It was a scandal.