“What are you waiting for?” he said.
I pulled the light blue Las Palmas T-shirt I had been given by my grandparents over my head and laced up my blue sneakers. Dad tossed the two empty pop bottles and the orange peel into the cooler bag, slung it over his shoulder, and set off, the wet towel crumpled up in his other hand. He said nothing on the way to the car. Opened the trunk, put in the cooler bag, took the life jacket from my hands, and placed it next to the bag together with his towel. The fact that I also had a towel didn’t seem to enter his head and I certainly didn’t intend to bother him with that.
Even though he had parked in the shade, the car was in the sun. The black seats were boiling hot and burned against my thighs. I wondered briefly whether to put my wet towel over the seat. But he would notice. Instead I placed my palms downward and sat on them, as close to the edge as I could.
Dad started the car and drove off at walking speed; the whole of the open gravel area, known as the firing range, was full of large stones. The road he took afterward was pitted with potholes, too, so he drove equally slowly along there. Green branches and bushes brushed the hood and roof, sometimes there was the odd thump, as a branch hit the car. My hands were still stinging, but less so now. It was only then it struck me that Dad was also wearing shorts on a red-hot seat. I glanced at his face in the mirror. It was grim and uncommunicative, but there was no indication that his thighs were burning.
When we came out onto the main road below the church he accelerated away and drove the five kilometers home at far above the speed limit.
“He’s frightened of water,” he told my mother that afternoon. It wasn’t true, but I said nothing. I wasn’t stupid.
A week later my grandparents on my mother’s side came to visit us. It was the first time they had been to Tybakken. Back on their farm in Sørbøvåg they weren’t the slightest bit out of place, they fit in perfectly, Grandad with his blue overalls and black narrow-brimmed hats, long brown rubber boots and constant spitting of tobacco, Grandma with her worn but clean, flowery dresses, gray hair, and broad body, and hands that always trembled slightly. But when they got out of the car in the drive in front of our house, after Dad had picked them up from Kjevik, I could see at once they didn’t fit in. Grandad was wearing his gray Sunday suit, light blue shirt, and a gray hat, in his hand he held his pipe, not by the stem, the way Dad did, but with his fingers round the bowl. He used the stem to point with, I noticed, when later they were being shown around our garden. Grandma wore a light-gray coat, light-gray shoes and on her arm she carried a bag. No one dressed like that here. You never saw anyone dressed like that in Arendal, either. It was as though they came from another era.
They filled our rooms with their strangeness. Mom and Dad suddenly behaved differently, too, mostly Dad, who behaved just as he did at Christmas. His invariable “No” became “Why not?”; his ever-watchful eyes became affable, and a friendly hand could even be placed on my or Yngve’s shoulder as a casual greeting. But even though he chatted to Grandma with interest, I could see that in fact he wasn’t interested, there were always brief moments when he looked away, and then his eyes tended to be utterly lifeless. Grandad, cheerful and enthusiastic, but somehow smaller and more vulnerable here than he was at home, never appeared to notice this trait of Dad’s. Or perhaps he just ignored it.
One evening when they were with us Dad bought some crabs. For him they were the apotheosis of festive food, and even though it was early in the season there was meat in the ones he had managed to find. But my grandparents, they didn’t eat crab. If Grandad got crabs in the net, well, he would throw them back. Dad would later tell stories about this, he viewed it as comical, a kind of superstition, that crabs should be less clean than fish, just because they crawled over the seabed and didn’t swim as they pleased through the water above. Crabs might eat dead bodies, since they eat everything that falls to the bottom, but what were the odds of these crabs having chanced upon a corpse in the depths of the Skagerrak?
One afternoon we had been sitting in the garden drinking coffee and juice, afterward I had gone to my room, where I lay on my bed reading comic books, and I heard Grandma and Grandad coming up the stairs. They didn’t say anything, trod heavily on the steps, and went into the living room. The sunlight on the wall of my room was golden. The lawn outside had great patches of yellow and even brown, although Dad switched on the sprinkler the instant the local council gave permission. Everything I could see along the road, all the houses, all the gardens, all the cars, and all the tools leaning against walls and doorsteps, was in a state of slumber, it seemed to me. My sweaty chest stuck uncomfortably to the duvet cover. I got up, opened the door, and went into the living room, where Grandma and Grandad were sitting in their separate chairs.
“Would you like to watch TV?” I asked.
“Yes, the news is on soon, isn’t it?” Grandma said. “That’s what interests us, you know.”
I went over and switched on the TV. A few seconds passed before the picture appeared. Then the screen slowly lit up, the “N” of Dagsrevyen grew larger and larger as the simple xylophone jingle sounded, ding-dong-ding-dooong, faint at first, then louder and louder. I took a step back. Grandad leaned forward in his chair, the pipe stem pointing away from his hand.
“There we are,” I said.
Actually, I wasn’t allowed to turn on the TV, nor the large radio on the shelf by the wall, I always had to ask Mom or Dad if they could do it for me when there was something I wanted to see or listen to. But now I was doing it for Grandma and Grandad, surely Dad wouldn’t object to that.
All of a sudden the picture started flickering wildly. The colors became distorted. Then there was a flash, a loud puff!, and then the screen went black.
Oh no.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
“What happened to the TV?” Grandad asked.
“It’s broken,” I said, my eyes full of tears.
It was me who had broken it.
“It can happen,” Grandad said. “And actually we like the news on the radio better.”
He got up from his chair and shuffled over to the radio with his small steps. I went into my room. Chill with fear, my stomach churning, I lay down on the bed. The duvet cover was cool against my hot, bare skin. I took a comic from the pile on the floor. But I was unable to read. Soon he would come in, go over to the TV, and switch it on. If it had broken while I had been alone perhaps I could have acted as if nothing had happened, then he would have thought it had stopped working of its own accord. Although probably he would have figured out that it was me even so, because he had a nose for anything untoward, one glance at me was enough for him to know something was wrong and he put two and two together. Now, however, I couldn’t feign ignorance, Grandma and Grandad had been witnesses, they would tell him what had happened, and if I tried to hide anything it would make matters much, much worse.
I sat up on the bed. I had a knot in my stomach, but there was no hint of the warmth and softness that illness brought with it, it was cold and painful and so tight that no tears in the world could undo it.
For a while I sat crying.
If only Yngve had been at home. Then I could have stayed with him in his room for as long as possible. But he was out swimming with Steinar and Kåre.
A sense that I would be nearer to him if I went into his room, even though it was empty, brought me to my feet. I opened the door, tiptoed along the landing, and into his room. His bed had been painted blue, mine orange, in the same way as his cupboard doors were blue and mine were orange. The room smelled of Yngve. I went to the bed and sat down.