“I’m like a whited sepulchre,” I say. “You’re the one who is fine.”
She laughs then, deep down in her throat, and I laugh too although I did not mean to be funny, and she asks if I am still cold, and then I answer no, and someone says: “Do you like it when I do this?” but afterwards I do not remember which one of us it was, and then I ask: “What’s your first name?” and she definitely answers something with a G, but I am already sleeping then and do not hear a thing.
6
I AM FLYING a soundless helicopter above Oslo town. I am not yet born. That doesn’t matter because I am high up and merely looking and shall not interfere. But everything is known to me. There is glass around me on all sides and a rushing silence. The city lies beneath me. It is early morning. The helicopter circles from Nydalen to the fjord, I can see the forests and the Holmenkollen ski jump and the river running through the city like a silvery-grey ribbon with all the bridges and the small boats moored to poles right down by the mouth, and nothing moves except a pale speck on its way to the river and one of the bridges crossing to the Maridalsveien on the other side. It is my father. The war is over, the party is over, spring has gone and summer has passed with its male choirs singing and laughter across the country and Norwegian flags flying from newly painted poles; the summer he rode on old buses with his white chorister’s cap on his head or on the back of old lorries decorated with beech leaves and red, white and blue ribbons, the stench of bad diesel burning his nose, and he sang at the top of his voice. Now the rubbish rolls along the pavements.
Everything is black and white again, as in films. Autumn is coming, and he turns on to the bridge with the old leather briefcase under his arm, and that briefcase is so worn out that he keeps a rope tied round it to hold it together, and the late summer wind buffets his back with a hint of the first cold and it pulls at his coat, which is the same one he had ten years earlier when he bought it second-hand. It is almost white now. For five years he learned things he would never have dreamed of, and they cannot be used for anything now, cannot be told to anyone. He stops on the bridge and leans against the white-painted iron railing where the paint is peeling off in big flakes and the iron is rusty beneath. He stands there gazing into the running water until it makes him dizzy, then he has to sit down on the coarse planks with his back to the railing and his case on his lap and close his eyes. Up the road across the bridge is the factory, but he just sits there quite still as the minutes pass, seven o’clock has come and gone, and I fly around him in big circles and can see him up close and at the same time as a little white fleck, and then he straightens his back, stretches his arms out to the sides and starts breathing deeply. Slowly in and out with closed eyes, in and out with his case on his lap, in the nearly white coat and the river under the bridge and the waterfall he hears but cannot see, but which I can see quite clearly foaming white, and it falls and it falls, and then I start to weep so loudly it wakes me.
I am sopping wet in the face and my back is stiff. I don’t know what time it is, but when I turn round it is light outside, and there’s a scrap of paper on the pillow beside me. I see it at once. I run my hand over the sheet. The warmth has gone. I lie on my back looking up at the ceiling, and then I get that feeling of a film I sometimes have, though not as often as when I was younger, but sometimes, in certain situations. As if I am this man in a film and have to get inside him to play him properly and feel what he feels after a night when everything possible has happened and he wakes up in the bed of a woman he has not even talked to before, and he lies staring up at the ceiling letting everything sort of sink in, and I look at him and at the same time I am him. It is rather an unpleasant feeling. Because in fact it is only play-acting, and perhaps when I look up at the ceiling I do not feel anything, although I am the one that all this has happened to. This is what it’s like, at times, but it was more frequent before, and it usually stops the minute I manage to move.
So I pick up the note and read:
“Didn’t want to wake you. First to nursery school, then to work. Someone has to keep the wheels turning. There’s a clean towel in the bathroom. Make sure the door locks when you leave. See you.”
There is no name. I get out of bed and go out into the hall stark naked and open the door of the adjoining room. It is a child’s room. A boy. I’ll be damned. I must have seen them together many times, but last night I did not give it a thought. I concentrate and try to remember what he looks like, and perhaps I see the outline of a figure, a certain height, a certain width, a certain softness of the body, but I cannot see a face. I go into the living room in search of a photograph. Single mothers always have photographs of their sons on the wall. There is one above the sofa. A boy with smooth fair hair, maybe four. He is probably older now, but not much so if he goes to nursery school still. He is the boss already. He looks at me with that look. I am standing naked in his living room, with tears drying on my face and I am forty-three years old, and he challenges me. I lean over the sofa and turn his face to the wall.
“All right, you just glare away there,” I say aloud. And then I laugh. He has been lying behind the thin wall all night hugging a teddy bear in his arms while I have had his mother in my arms and hugged her even harder, and when he was deep in a dream about a red fire engine or a spaceship with laser cannons or maybe Postman Pat with his black-and-white-cat, I was deep inside his mother both here and there and closer to her than he has been for more than four years.
“You lost,” I say, “two-nil at home,” and laugh again, but it does not sound too good, so I stop at once and go into the bathroom to take the shower I sorely need, and I lock the door when I leave.
*
The caretaker looks at my clothes, he is pissed off because everyone loses their keys, because he has to go out and walk several hundred metres to each block with the master key, and he is forever writing orders for new ones. He has other things to do, he says. If that is so, it has escaped me; there are light bulbs missing in most of the basement corridors, in one stairwell a pane of glass has been broken since New Year’s Eve, and the mechanism of the garage door has disintegrated, and the door has been left open for two weeks. He twists the key in my lock and flings the door wide with a condescending air, and glances inside. He knows about the likes of me, he has seen pictures of me in the papers and knows what I’m up to, and he thinks it is crap. Then he gives me the slip of paper with the key number on and permission to have a new one cut.
“It will cost you,” he says, “it always does when you chuck things around. Don’t let it happen again. OK?”
But he doesn’t hold out much hope, that’s obvious, and then he goes off, on his way to his long list of chores. It is a tough life, being a caretaker.
I go in and slam the door behind me. I stand still for a moment. Then I turn and look at myself in the mirror. The swelling under my eye has quite gone and the colour is normal. My hair is still damp and has started to curl. The pale, frozen man I saw last night has vanished, you would think I lived a normal life, that I was on my way out to the bus for work after a shower. But I am not on my way to anything my father would have called a job.
The keys are on the shelf below the mirror. I cannot remember putting them there. I’ve never put them there before. I pick them up and stuff them in my right trouser pocket where they belong, and in the kitchen I throw the permit into the bin. Suddenly I feel so hungry it hurts. I open the fridge. There is not much left inside, and what there is I put in a paper towel and chuck out, and pour the dregs of the milk into the sink. Then I fetch a bucket, squirt detergent in and fill it with hot water, find a clean cloth in the hall cupboard, and then I wash the fridge and thoroughly dry it. After that I attack the dishes which have cluttered the worktop for ages, almost tap-dancing with impatience because I am so hungry. I wash the worktop and the kitchen table and polish the brass bowl, and I wash all the cupboard doors and the wall behind the sink and the top and the sides of the stove where I can reach, and then I stand back and study it all, and finally, not quite satisfied, I fill another bucket and wash the floor.