A couple of hundred metres further up Jonsen came running from his house, it was a sight to see, he looked awkward, and clumsy, and he came right out on to the gravel road and stopped in the middle with his hands on his hips. The sergeant groaned and hit the brakes. He rolled down the window. What is it now, he said. Jonsen came round the car, he was thinking, I have to do this, it’s not something I can walk away from, and he bent down, his hand on the car door and said through the open window, I’ll take Tommy. What, said the sergeant. You can’t, we’ve already decided on someone else. Who, Jonsen said. The sergeant said a name. He blushed. What, Tommy said from the back seat. No, no, that’s not good, Jonsen said.
The sergeant stared straight ahead through the windscreen. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I know, he said. He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. Has anyone here got a telephone, he said. No, Jonsen said. I mean yes, Høiland has of course, Jonsen said, pointing a few houses further up the road. He just had it installed, there will be more soon, they’re going to dig trenches, he said. The sergeant shook his head, suddenly he was so tired, why was he the one to deal with this. He got out of the car with a groan. Shit, he said under his breath. He left the black Volvo in the middle of the road with the door open and the engine running and walked up to Høiland’s house as he rolled down his shirtsleeves to his wrists and then he looked like someone else, more like someone they knew, more like one of them. After all, Jonsen had been in the same class as his older brother.
Tommy got out of the car and walked round the back and stood looking down at the house where he had always lived. The carpenter had already boarded up one window and gone on to the next. The house looked quite different already, it looked blind and not the way a home should look. He felt sick. As though he were spinning through the air. As though he were falling. I’m falling, Tommy thought, it’s so strange. I’m so dizzy. He crouched down. He leaned forward with his knuckles on the gravel. Then he threw up. I’m thirteen years old, he thought, I’ll be fourteen in the autumn, but he didn’t feel any age. Then he heard the sergeant returning from Høiland’s house. Shit, the sergeant said as he walked, and he groaned, as he often did, he had a heavy heart and carried it with him wherever he went. Tommy got up and walked back around the car. Jonsen was standing there. I’ve spoken to the police chief, the sergeant said. He looked at Tommy, he didn’t even wink. Then he said to Jonsen, he can stay with you for the time being. Until child welfare can find somewhere else. He can’t live with you, you live alone, he has to be with a family, those are the rules. Do you understand, the sergeant said. Jonsen said nothing. Then he said, that’s fine. You can take your bag, the sergeant told Tommy, and Tommy walked around the car and opened the boot and took out his bag, and then he went back and put his bag on the road and opened the door to the seat where Siri sat in the corner with the diary held tightly to her chest. He leaned in. They looked at each other. Hi, he said, and she smiled. She will stay with me in Jonsen’s house for the time being, right, he said aloud. Goddamn it, the sergeant said, why aren’t you paying attention, of course she’s not staying with you, are you stupid, he said, Jesus Christ. It’s all right, Tommy, Siri said. I’ll be fine. Are you sure, Tommy said. Do you know where you’re going to stay, he said. Yes, Siri said, he told me before you and Jim came. I’m going to Lydersen’s. Right, Tommy said, who’s Lydersen. I don’t know who he is, Siri said. Tommy straightened up and held on to the door frame. See you tomorrow then, Siri, he said. See you tomorrow, Tommy. He closed the door, and the sergeant got in and started the engine, and they moved off.
Come on, let’s go inside, Jonsen said, and Tommy took his bag and they walked up to the house.
TOMMY ⋅ 1966
THE THING ABOUT Mørk was that it could have been anywhere. There were hundreds of places in Norway called Mørk, you just had to look in the atlas of Norway, in the index at the back, and they were scattered all across the country. But however many there were, Mørk was where we lived, in our own Mørk, although in fact it wasn’t quite in Mørk, but rather six kilometres further east in a neighbourhood where the houses formed a line on both sides of a gravel road. But to Mørk we had to go. That was where the shop was and the mill and the garage, and the BP station for those who had a car and the school for those who went to school and the church for those who were Christian, and hell, they were quite a few. I was a Christian myself. I felt Christian, perhaps not as Christian as Jim, but how else should I feel. There was nothing else. On a scale of one to ten I was about six, seven at the most, but it wasn’t something I wasted my time thinking about.
There was a railway station in Mørk, and many of the old people thought it was a curse, what with all the riff-raff that got off the train from Oslo, car thieves and communists and boys with long hair like girls, and you couldn’t tell them apart. The school bus left for Mørk from the road where we lived, but there were no other buses and of course that was bad for those who had a limp or were old and short of breath, but that was the way it had always been, and if time was on your side and you weren’t lame or stooped, you could easily walk to Mørk in a little over an hour.
Of course you could cycle to Mørk, and that was what we did when there was football in the evening or community cinema in the school gym or just to hang around the green pumps at Lysbu’s BP station on the crossroads and fool around. We cycled, Jim and I, and sometimes Willy, and we got there in no time.
It was Jim and I who stuck together, we always had, you would not often see one of us out on the road without the other, without Jim shoulder to shoulder with Tommy, or the other way around. It wasn’t easy for people in the neighbourhood to understand, our being so different, our lives so different behind the closed doors in the evening, but we got a lot out of those differences, and though many said that birds of a feather stick together, it wasn’t true in our case.
My father disappeared, no one ever saw him again, and it was strange, considering the smashed leg he would have had to drag with him, that he could vanish, just like that. For a couple of weeks the four of us managed on our own. Siri and I took care of most things for the twins, and after that I moved in with Jonsen, a bit further up the road. We had been friends for a long time. He was a bachelor, about the same age as my mother, and lived in the house next to Jim’s. I was supposed to stay there until child welfare had worked out what to do with me. But they didn’t have a clue what to do, so they just let time pass.
The twins stayed with the Liens on the opposite side of the road from our old house. The day the four of us moved, the police sergeant came in his black Volvo, and a carpenter came in a communist van with his tools in the back, and covered the windows with boards and put a steel bar with a padlock across the door. No one told us in advance, so most of our things were still inside.
The Liens had never had any children of their own, and I guess they were a bit old to be foster parents, but I had always liked them, and they let me speak to the girls every day, the word ‘no’ never crossed their lips. Sometimes I was also inside the house, on the sofa with one little sister on each side, they were six then and their hair was done in identical pigtails, the only difference was the colour of the ribbons, one had red, the other blue, and we watched the Monday film together whenever children were allowed to, mostly old black-and-white films starring Fred Astaire or Cary Grant or sometimes Humphrey Bogart in a world which had nothing to do with ours, and the twins would clap their hands every time a man kissed a woman on the screen, and they looked at each other and laughed until they toppled over, but of course they didn’t understand a thing.