When my brother and I drove on from Vestby Wayside Inn that early summer of 1990 after the journey to Copenhagen when we had tossed wreaths on to the sea and drunk toasts in the bar with police inspectors, psychiatrists, firefighters and danced with nurses more attractive than we had ever seen before, we were really in trouble from lack of sleep, we had probably only had half an hour on the benches outside the inn, and that was far too little, but the sun was baking and it was impossible to lie there any longer. The van was hard to drive, at least for me it was, its gear lever on the steering column, which I wasn’t used to, and anyway I hadn’t driven a car for a long time. By the time we reached the Swedish border I was so tired and frustrated, getting into second every time I meant to be in fourth, that I let him drive the rest of the way to Gothenburg. He did so gladly. After all, he was Big Brother and I was Little Brother, and it was his neighbour who owned the vehicle.
“I envy you being able to put words to all that has happened,” he said as we swung into the bend past the Lysekil turn-off, where we had been a few weeks before when the burning ship had been towed in to the nearest harbour, with hoses spraying from a retinue of fireboats, and we stood on the quay and looked up at the empty hull lying under a blue sky with great fan-shaped black patches around the portholes, and a policeman wouldn’t let us go on board. It was Sunday and there were tourists there and people walking and small boats with dazzling white sails on their way out of the harbour, but no-one looked at the ship except us, and we started to argue with the Swedish policeman there on the long wharf, for we had driven so far, and we did want to go on board, but it was no use, and then I started to cry and I wanted to go for the policeman. My brother held me back and whispered something in my ear, I cannot remember what, but I went back to the car without resisting. Then we just sat in our seats and looked out of the windows.
He was wrong. I was body only and no words, just as he was, and no matter how much we talked there was always air between what we said and what we did. It was like champagne. I had tasted champagne at a publisher’s party some time before and could get my name wrong when someone asked me who I was. Almost everything we said was wrong.
What we did was drive. We drove the whole time, we spent thousands of kroner on petrol. We couldn’t sit still. We dived under the spaghetti junction on the way in to Gothenburg, and when we came out of the tunnel we drove straight into a wall of water. The rain poured down harder than we had ever seen, it slammed on the roof of the car and streamed over the windscreen and we couldn’t see a metre in front of us. The world was glittering and milky-white and impenetrable with red dots that grew and grew, and I shouted: “Brake,” and my brother hit the brake. The vehicle in front was suddenly dead ahead with huge rear lights. It was a massive trailer, stock still in the middle of the 70 limit, where it had given up. My brother stood on the pedal and spun the wheel at the same time, the car swerved and ended up crosswise on the road with the door on my side slap up against the back end of the trailer. T.I.R. it said in huge letters above the number plate.
I started to laugh, hit the dashboard with my palm and said: “A split second more and the whole Jansen family would have been wiped out. Not bad, that two months, and all gone. Some disappearing act.”
My brother sat with his forehead on the wheel, and didn’t feel like laughing, but then he had to, and then he cried a while, and then it stopped raining. Quite suddenly.
For the rest of the way to the boat we drove in silence, with the new light coming in through the windows, past the bridges and the steep wall of rock on the left, and turned off where the old America boats had moored, and the emigrants went on board with their chests and trunks for third class right down into the bowels of the ship, and had there been a car deck in those days, it would have been under the car deck, in cramped quarters with no other light than a dim bulb in the bulkhead, and what hope had left them. The sea sparkled, flat calm in the sunshine, and from Stigberget the remains of the shower came, as if from an unknown lake, in waterfalls down the long staircases and streamed out across the asphalt so the spray leaped up from the wheels of the van.
The crossing only took three hours. We could have sat in the saloon and read the bulky Swedish and Danish papers as we usually did, but we were drained and hungry and went straight to the restaurant. We ordered a three-course meal with beer and schnapps although before we had always just gone to the cafeteria, and we paid by Visa cards which were furry with insurance money. We spent two hours eating, and the third one we sat on deck in low chairs with our backs to the land we were approaching. A man stood at the rail gazing into the water. He didn’t move an inch the whole time I was there, and I thought of maybe getting up and going over to stand there with him, but I never found the energy.
It was evening when we drove ashore, a light evening with warm sea air over the docks, and we drove through the harbour with the windows open and past the new railway station where the goods wagons lay in tight rows on the rails with rusty red fittings and Carlsberg painted on their sides in green. Outside the rebuilt merchant navy college a white-painted container crane stood on the lawn looking like something from a science-fiction movie. We drove north on the coast road with marram grass along the asphalt the whole way and the sea to the east and the sandy shore right down where we once found a dead seal, and the island with the lighthouse furthest out without its beam now for all we could see, and then on for the last bit where the gravel crunched under the tyres and the rosa rugosa bushes scraped our paintwork at the first turn. It was never going to get dark that evening, only the slanting half-light and the rows of shining seagulls in the shallows as far as the eye could reach. We turned into the avenue of willow trees, drove to the end and parked by the wall, switched off the engine and sat there saying nothing. The cabin was newly painted yellow, the light in the west behind it and the windows darker than everything else around us. A pheasant strutted across the lawn and into the field beyond. My brother watched it go, biting his lip, and I said: “We forgot to buy booze on the boat.”
“Damn,” my brother said. “That’s true. That never happened before. And me dying for a drink. I’ve been thinking of it the whole way from the harbour.”
“Me too. Maybe he’s left a drop. He always buys it, but he doesn’t drink much. Didn’t, I mean.”
We got out of the van, not slamming the doors but pushing them shut, because of the silence around us, not a sound but the sea sighing as it always does behind the trees by the shore when I realise that is what I can hear and stop thinking it is silence itself. My brother walked ahead with the key in his hand round the cabin to the door. He was more than ten centimetres taller than me and a good deal broader and was a buffer to the wind whenever it blew, while I walked behind, lighter on my feet and was ready to run if I had to.
It was colder inside than out. Two cups were on the worktop, and a half-finished crossword on the table. Time had come to a halt on the old ship’s clock above the door, and my brother went from room to room mumbling: “Where the hell has he hidden the booze?”
I went out to the van and opened the back doors. A stove, a washing machine, several rag rugs, a couple of long shelves and a huge painting of a man smoking a pipe beside a house far into a Norwegian fjord. If I judged the perspective aright that man wouldn’t fit into a house twice that size on his knees. It had hung on the wall above the sofa as long as I could remember, and we had always thought it was ugly. But it was an original painting, and my father wanted it there. It is genuine, he said when we were small, and that was something we could not argue with. No-one else we knew had a genuine painting on their wall, except Bandini across the road, but he made them himself, so that didn’t count. I stood looking at all the things. There was a stove in the cabin already, and there was no room for a washing machine, nor plumbing for it. We knew that. I closed the doors and went inside again. My brother stood by the lavatory, saying: “I can’t find the booze. I can’t find the fucking booze.”