The blood is running from his mouth and mingles with saliva and tears. Iver tries to raise his arms to protect himself, but they refuse to obey and fail to ward off the blows landing on him. Soon he no longer feels the pounding, the punches simply make contact and fling his head from side to side. But he is able to think that if this assault doesn’t stop soon, the ending will be terribly, terribly bad.
Chapter 76
The smoke is different this time. The opening stretches further. Henning sees fumbling hands in front of him trying to wave away the smoke. Somehow they succeed. The contours of a CD rack appear as he coughs and splutters. He stops and turns to the left where the stripe of light continues. But then the smoke thickens again, the light disappears, and even though he swings his arms frantically, it makes no difference. Everything in front of him goes completely black.
Henning sits up with a start, quickly wipes his face and looks around for the flames. But he can’t hear the crackling of fire and the door is still intact.
Those infernal dreams again.
He lets himself sink back on to the pillow and waits for the smoke detector above him to flash. In the distance a siren wails. There is always a siren somewhere, he thinks, there is always someone whose life is about to be changed for ever by something happening at this very moment. There is no guarantee that promises us we can close our eyes, safe in the knowledge that we will open them again. Life, as we know it, can change in an instant.
Jonas once asked him a question, as he often did — especially at bedtime. It could be a simple one such as why the walls were white or a more complicated one such as what was wrong with the man they saw on their way home from nursery, the one who was sleeping on a bench in Birkelunden Park. But it might also be something more profound, thoughts Henning could easily see would baffle his son without Jonas finding the time to think them through or remember them long enough to articulate during the day. But the questions would come at night when everything calmed down.
‘Daddy, do you hate Mummy?’
There is nothing unique about what happened to Nora and Henning. It happens every day, all over the world. People meet, they fall in love, they fall out of love, fall in love with each other again. They do stupid things or experience something that makes it impossible for them to go on living together. So they part, often to start over with another person. Or not. It’s not unique. And yet, from time to time, the thought of why it had to happen to him absolutely chokes him. Why did it have to be them? Why did it have to be Jonas?
‘ Did Mummy say that? ’
‘ No, but — ’
Henning turned over, rested on his elbows and looked at Jonas. But the more he thought about it, the harder it became to come up with an answer. The moment stretched out, it became too long for him to contain it, and all he could finally say was, ‘ I don’t hate Mummy, Jonas.’
No explanation. Just a brief statement, like when a child says ‘because’ when you ask them to explain why they cut up the newspaper with a pair of scissors. And Henning doesn’t know how long he lay there, on his elbows, looking at Jonas’s searching eyes, but it felt like for ever.
A persistent buzzing sound and a sharp light bring him back to the present. His eyes dart to the bedside table where his mobile is vibrating. Henning leans across and picks it up. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, it’s… Nora.’
Henning can hear voices in the background. He sits up. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Iver.’ A note of panic has entered her voice. ‘He’s in hospital. He was attacked and beaten up.’
‘What?’
‘He’s in a coma.’
Henning’s jaw drops. His eyes flicker from side to side. ‘Where are you?’ he asks.
‘At Ulleval Hospital.’
‘Okay,’ he says, and stands up. ‘I’m on my way.’
Chapter 77
Iver, in a coma, beaten senseless. Given what he was investigating, it can be no coincidence, Henning thinks and throws 200 kroner on to the passenger seat for the cab driver. He rushes inside the hospital. Walking as fast as he can manage, he makes his way to Emergency Admissions. The highly polished floor swims in front of his eyes as he goes through two doors, passes waiting next of kin, sees white walls and randomly displayed pictures with equally random motifs and notices doctors and cleaners, but he doesn’t look anyone in the eye. Not until he sees Nora.
She gets up from a chair and comes to meet him. Even from a distance he can see that her eyes are red. She doesn’t stop walking until he embraces her, and then she clings to him.
Christ, how she clings to him.
He holds her for a long time and feels his body grow hot all over. Old memories are reawakened, images he doesn’t want to see and certainly doesn’t want to relive. But he is incapable of suppressing the memory of their time together, which is so far distant now that nothing can bridge the gap between them. And he hates himself because it hurts him so much that she is crying and even more that she is crying for somebody else.
‘What are the doctors saying?’ Henning asks and holds her out from him.
She sniffs and shakes her head at the same time. ‘They don’t know very much yet.’
‘He’s still in a coma?’
She nods and dries the tears from her eyes. They walk over to a seating area and sit down.
‘Who found him?’
‘An old lady who lives nearby. The noise woke her up so she decided to have a look outside.’
‘But she didn’t see who did it?’
Nora shakes her head again, lifts her hands to her mouth and squeezes her eyes tightly shut. Fresh tears roll down.
‘How did you find out?’
‘Iver briefly regained consciousness when he was brought in here.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘Not that I know of.’
Henning nods. A nurse marches past them.
‘Have the police been here?’
‘Yes, but they’ve gone again.’
Henning breathes in deeply, stays in his seat and looks around without taking anything in.
‘Have you been to see him?’
‘Only for a minute.’
‘What did he look like?’
Nora stares at him for a long time. Then she says in a voice that breaks, ‘Bloody awful.’
Henning returns her gaze, watches her tears. ‘Are you staying here until he wakes up?’ he asks her.
She nods.
‘It could be a long time — you know that, don’t you? The doctors never try to rush this. You must let nature take its course. Iver will wake up when he is ready.’
She looks at him with eyes that well up. ‘ If he wakes up.’
Henning doesn’t know how Nora reacted when she was told that Jonas was dead. Nor does he want to know. But he heard that she lost fourteen kilos in the four weeks that followed. Several of them are still missing, but she is slowly starting to recover. And if there is anything left of the Nora he knew, then she has been balancing on a knife’s edge every single day since.
Henning considers a sentence that is forming itself inside him. He never thought he would say it, let alone mean it. ‘Iver is a fighter, Nora. He’ll be all right.’
She looks at him. ‘I hope so.’
‘He will.’
‘I can’t bear to lose… ’